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
64 7.11 Crew Pick Up Boman The crew pick up was nominal. Lovell Nothing else. Everything was fine . 8.0 SYSTEMS OPERATION 8 . 1 Ple.tfom Borman We aligned the platform 3 t imes. W:ach time it worked just as advertised. Daytime alignrnent,of course,was no prob] em. We got very ample yaw reference out the window. Lovell Caging, for fast heat dropout took approximately 23 minutes. Boman Night time, the initial alignment is a litt1e difficult i f you do not have a full moon. With a fu 1 1 moon it is al most as easy at night as it is in the daytime. It rea 1.ly lit the terrain up. Lovell To get your initial spacecraft attitude, the full moon is very nice . Borman Right, without a full moon, I think it woul d take you a little while to align to get your Spacecraft BEF, so that you would not have to torque the platfom too far for alignment. Lovell You get to know the stars. "!3orman Yes, you have to use the stars . It would be difficult to pick up the ground and track it. Platform Morles: CAGE. Jim ~aid that took 23 minutes for a fast heat drop out.
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.