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.
152 Borman Even though you know the star very wel l , using the system of estimating the angl e i n ahea d of time, you l eave your s el f open to picking the wrong s t ars. Lovell Yes, one of the big things about t he sextant is you have t o be sure you can identify the star when you are looking inside t he sextant after you get the thing down because you might get the wrong star. That is why you should use stars in sextant navigation that have identifying features in the fie l d of vi ew of the sextant. For instance Capella was a very good one because it has the 3 littl e stars around i t, I guess there were 2 stars, I forget . Borman Three stars . Lovell Three stars , but anyway you coul d tel l Capella when you looked through the sextant!But,a star that was a l l out by itself, even though it was bright,you really could not tell whether tha t was a star or not until you went out and l ooked again,and tha t was sort of difficult . Borman We did not have any radar but I know darn wel l , if I was out trying t o ef fect a rendezvous , I woul d much rather have an operati.ng radar wi th range and range rate than I would that s extant. Lovell Wel l the thi.ng i s: there are a l ot of f ac tors that affect t his thing: window g l are , the f act that we had to t urn on white light everytime we got a reading, because
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.