Documents / Official release

Gemini 5 Technical Debriefing, Part II, 1965

National Aeronautics and Space Administration · 1965 · 325 pages · text from the file's own layer

This is a preliminary Part II transcript of the Gemini 5 (GT-5) flight crew debriefing, prepared by the Spacecraft Operations Branch of NASA's Flight Crew Support Division and dated September 2, 1965. It records astronauts Cooper and Conrad at the Crew Quarters, Cape Kennedy. They discuss how the spacecraft systems worked, including the platform and the OAMS thruster failures. The transcript also covers operational checks, visual sightings, experiments, training, premission planning, and medical aspects. It was originally classified Confidential.

From the source:Release of 2026-06-12 Incident: August 30 - September 2, 1965, Cape Kennedy, Florida. This document is a preliminary transcript (Part II) derived from voice recordings of the Gemini 5 flight crew technical debriefing. NASA conducted this debriefing between August 30, 1965, and September 2, 1965, at the Crew Quarters, Cape Kennedy, Florida. Astronauts L. Gordon Cooper and Charles “Pete” Conrad described observing debris and “snow” and “all sorts of glittering pieces of this, that and the other thing” in the “Visual Sightings” section of the document (pages 157-220).

  • p. 119 …Waste disposal- pack harder. Yes . Pack tighter. That's a very grave problem, in the f…
  • p. 231 …It gets harder the higher they get. Especi ally the second stage. I got the first…
Conrad
Cooper
Conrad
Cooper
Conrad
Cooper
Conrad
Cooper
where it will burn --
Yes , you could smell paint.
It burns the paint in the spacecraft .
You can smell paint cooking. That's the first
thing that we noticed, the first day. I 'll tell
you what heats up. It 's the reostat . Well, the
thunderstorm light th.at Gordo 1 s referring to doesn't
have a reostat. That just flat puts out heat.
It just flat puts out heat. You can burn your
glove right off your hand on th.at one.
Your under-window right and left lights -- if we
ran those at great periods of time with the light
dimmed down , th.at reostat gets so bloody hot th.at
you can smell the paint cooking again. I felt that
that was a real bad sit uation and we have comments
on th.at --
So we kept rotating these lights on and off.
We never did burn our lights too steadily unless we
absolutely had to . The other problem there was that
anything that generates th.at much heat is going to
have a tendency to burn out, and I 'll tell you, you
lose one of those cockpit lights, buddy, and you
are screwed.
You really are.
,QNFl9Et ◄ TIAL.21a
99

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Official release, from the pursue collection. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is under it. 325 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.