Documents / Official release
This is a preliminary transcript of the Gemini 7 technical debriefing, dated December 23, 1965, from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. It was made from tape recordings of the crew debriefing held December 19 to 21, 1965 at the Crew Quarters, Cape Kennedy, Florida. In it, Frank Borman and Jim Lovell go through countdown, powered flight, insertion, station keeping with the booster, systems, experiments and training. The table of contents also lists a section on visual sightings during orbital flight.
From the source:Release of 2026-06-12 Incident: December 19-21, 1965, Cape Kennedy, Florida. This document is a preliminary transcript derived from voice recordings of the Gemini 7 flight crew debriefing conducted December 19-21, 1965, at the Crew Quarters, Cape Kennedy, Florida. Lights and flashes are mentioned and there is discussion about having proper illumination for vehicle docking. Borman and Lovell discuss celestial and terrestrial observational anomalies and note sightings of Mercury, meteors, aurora, and lightning. They also discuss not being able to see any stars once the Sun comes up.
“Cairo”2 pages
138 went out about forty feet against a dark background. You could see this light haze going out about forty feet. It wasn't a bell shaped pattern, as we thought it was going to be, but it was like a garden hose, straight out. At a distance we could not see the bright flash of ignition in the chamber itself. All we could see was the haze going out. But as we got in closer, we could start picking up the bright flash, ma.inly because of attitude I suspect, as we were getting closer to see it. It had no effect on our spacecraft at all. They actually fired about twenty feet away with their forward firing thrusters to us, and departed. l3or:man They got in back behind us in the adapter and fired their forward firing thrusters and .made the curtain jiggle. 1 don I t know how far away they were when they did this. 1 hope they can tell us, and give you some idea of the effect that these thrusters :might have on the EVA Mission. It ' s just like firing a rocket at night. I guess that's the way we expected it to look. That is exactly what you are doing, firing a rocket at night. 10.4 Reentry Borman We retrofired in the darkest, .most dis.m.al part of the night slcy-, and we didn't see anything. We didn 't see Adapter Separation. We didn't see My of the retros fire. We d.idn't
Official release, from the pursue collection. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is above. 222 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.