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. 128 …to me because if I ' m wor king I eat a lot and if I ' m…
  • p. 178 …I'm tal king about where it fades you lmow completely. And it's act ually…
140 •
there t he point is, right there . You just don't
miss it. Updating, of course , you 've got to keep
these times updated as you--depending on your
ephemeris, and how you are sliding around on your
original time. Ours, fortunately , was just right
on the money practically the whol e mission , fairly
late in the program we began to decay enough that
we were changing times fairly significantly, but
the weather is the biggest factor of all . Of course,
if t he weather is bad in the area, you do:1 1 t get it .
You just don ' t get the t arget . I f it exists , humidity
l ike you find along the West Coast of t he United
States then you aren ' t going to get it although
some places out there like the point by Santa Barbara
and Point Arguella and some of those poin·~s, even in
spite of fog and haze , almost i nvariably Bhow up .
These are the kind of things that should be taken
into consideration . The weather is pr obably t he
biggest factor on whether you are going to get a
point or not . Sun angle is not so importcnt as
weather, although it definitely is a factc,r in that
very early or very late the sun angles ree.lly tend
to cut down the visibility, particularly if you have
the addition of humidity in the air . If you have
"COMFfD~ •

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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.