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.
“Sea”7 pages
162 we were, when we went by there , and saw two blinks of the laser. We had the photograph in front of us marking where the laser was located. We saw Holoman , we saw White Sands but we never did see the beam except the short flashes . Lovell The magnitude of this laser is a lot less than either Frank or I suspected after our briefings by the experimenters a nd by ac t ually looking at one at Houston. Obviously this laser at Houston was a lot shorter and can be very much magnified. Borman Tracking was no problem ~ We acquired one over Hawaii; we were able to t r ack it easily. The pr oblem is acquisition of the light . Lovell The light beam is a lot smaller point than we suspected. Borman And then again the big bugaboo in this whole experiment was weather. Ascension never got up, we never got ground equipment at Ascension. We never got really good passes at White Sands because we were a l ways about 300 mil es South . And Hawaii was available to us on only 2 passes . We a cquired the laser on both passes, but were not able to get the handheld laser on the beam on the ground . Borman Okay, how about the field of view? Lovell The field of view. Well , let me t alk a bout the equipment . Basically the equipment was fine , except for the telescopes
Official release, from the pursue collection. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is under it. 222 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.