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.
148 nothing else to say about the D-5 except the equipment did not work. Lovell Well , star acquisition and identification, which has nothing to do with the equipment, was outstanding with the chart. Actually, I would like to put in a little pitch here, for the sill!Ulator, because the visual part of the simulator was a big help. It gave us a good idea of what we could expect in flight. And the Planetarium's work was very valuable in conjunction with the simulator. I think that we did not waste time with any of our star recosnition stuf'f. They did come in handy. As a :matter of fact, if you really get to know that celestial sphere, you can really get around without the earth. 11.3 Simple Navigation D-9 Borman Jim used this test exclusively. He was trained at Ames. But we actually used the sextant down here before the flight many times with the experimenters. We used it in the simu.lator. Lovell Let me give so.me comments on this sextant. There are a lot of co.mments on the tape. Number one, the D-9 sextant alignment
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.