Gemini 5 Technical Debriefing, Part II, 1965

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).

159 D co•lE.-laEhtllAL ~
from getting?
Cooper Oh, well, a great many. Some areas--well , just in
general let's just say that some areaB of the
country would be completely clobbered in and we'd be
traveling over an undercast for great long expanses
of hundreds and hundreds of miles , and anything ·,
that was in there would be-- anything t o do with
any areas we desired to photograph in there whether
they were specified immediate areas 01· whether
they were just general pupose or S-5 , S-6 , were
not available for photography, and yet the next
day it might be wide open. The Himals.yas was
an ideal example of that too. For twc, different
days we traveled over that , you couldr..' t see
any of the craters or any of the ice flows or
anything due to the clouds . You could. see just
occasional areas and some of the lakee would be
open, so it was just heavy cloud cover- through
there for about a 2 day period and then it just
broke up wide open one day. Eut there were a great
many areas that there were cloud covered to the
point that you could not f i nd it. For instance,
the Carnarvon or I should say the woodly side