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.
28 Borman At 49t53 we got a picture of Houston with the 250 .mm l ens. I hope it comes out. Okay at 69t40 we did a Perigee Adjust Maneuver, Delta V 12.4, 16.5 seconds, and came right on the money, using the stars, no platform. I don't think that there is any problem at all with the proper stars in .making a gross adjustment. Lovell I think it was an excellent idea to do it without a platform, it takes two people. One person times and the other person burns on the star fro.m attitude. Both people check the attitudes by looking at the star charts and getting the updates. Then ma.king sure that the s/c is alined right and the reticle is up to get the accuracy pretty good. After that, once you get it s et in your mind what you are aiming at, one guy is in the cockpit with the watch or event timer and clocks it. The other guy bas to look out the window because you can't go back and forth. If you look in the cockpit at the watch, you can't adjust to look out f or the stars. So it takes two people for that. I think you can do a good job without a platform. Bor:ma.n I do too . Bor:ma.n There is one thing that was a pain in the neck, and I hope they get some good out of them, were UHF and the RF tests. That was an hour and a half transmitting every five minutes
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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.