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.
“Frank Borman”10 pages
No. 1) i t did not have as much l ight gathering as was required for thi s particul ar equipment. It should have a l arger magni f i cati on. 2) It had a green f il t er over it whi ch was s upposed to enhance picki ng up the beam , but a l l it di d was f ade out everything . You could not see terrain features a.nd you needed to see · terrain features t o find out where that beam was located . Borman Yes. to know where the beam was. Love l l You coul d l ook out a.nd .. .. we had photographs of the area where the beam shoul d be coming from. And we coul d acquire i t by our naked eye by just looki.ng out and seeing i t. But.as soon as you went to the telescope of the l aser, everything faded out to this green color. Unl ess you just happened to pi ck up the beam you're l ost and I never was ab l e to pick up the beam thru the t el esc ope . The filter was just too stro.ng . I much prefer to have a c lear view . So I coul d pick out the terrain features . The reticle of course .... Borman Of course. we knew that was shot before we took off. Lovell We never had a good check of t his thi.ng t hought at night, and I wish we had had a good night pass over something, but we never did. Because I fee l that we probab l y cou l d have probabl y picked up the beam a l ot better at night.
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.