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. 160 …I saw individual houses up in Tibet. One thing I didn't see for Gordo was…
  • p. 242 …shots down of Saigon, Tibet , Tibet , China, Japan , Arabian desert , Tibet , Tibet, China, Arabia, Hanoy, Phillipine…
  • p. 243 232 storm Doreen, West Coast , South Americ a , Andes , Formosa, big Islands of Japan , Tibet mountains…
  • p. 244 …Greed on Tibet? No , that was Gordo -- he real ly goes for that Ti beten country…
Cooper
FCSD Rep
Cooper
FCSD Rep
159 C
you really could see the lower altitude prevailing
winds in the cirrus clouds or the lower altitude
stratus type cloud you all around and you really
could see the wind pattern and one thing that
r eall y impressed me, was the- - on cloud formations
low altitude cloud formations--up in the Himalayan
areas ,how t hat stratus- type cloud would hang--
would just completely define the land shape . You ' d
see it hang in the valleys and swirl right down
in the valleys and you'd see where the peaks
were , i t would puff and was quite definitive of
the land mass. And then coming in off the--
you could see the prevailing wind direction in
the l ower altitude clouds . You could see the way
the wind would come in and you'd get the wind
shear where it would hit the mountain peaks
coming in off the desert areas there and it would
kick it up over the peak areas .
Okay.
Let me ask one question.
Okay.
Was ther e--as far as good pictures are concerned-
how many pictures did cloud coverage prevent you

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