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.
“Cooper”2 pages
173 Lovell Borman Lovell Borman Lovell Borman Lovell Borman next night pass, ending at 217 : 17 I counted discrete flashes of lightening for the entire pass. I collnted 206 discrete occurrances o:" lightning. This was with the spacecraft level in HORIZON SCAN mode, looking out one window with no yaw control. Now, we also saw individual meteors at different times in flight that are recorded on the tape recorder . But unfortunately we did not see this great shower that was supposed to come out of Gemini. I saw two in a period of about 10 minutes out of Gemini . They headed below us, of course. Alright, the meteors. Another significant observation that we made was a brilliant display of the Aurora. The Southern Aurora over Australia . And we have some pictures here. Sketches . Sketches of what it looked like, and we will cover this in the scientific debriefing. And we measured the time it took for stars to occult to the air glow layer, and for Venus to go through. I think this would be best to discuss when we talk to the scientists. I think so. Do you have anything else that was significant? As far
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.