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. 196 …But we were looking at that scr ewy gray- - Well , I 1 11 tell you , we…
  • p. 198 …jumbled and it's a real dim gray area there you ' re going through just for…
  • p. 317 …The gray interior paint flecks off of the guard bars and off several areas of the…
Cooper
Conrad
Cooper
Conrad
Cooper
Conrad
Cooper
185
Like doing it in the s imulator.
Until re t ros fired .
When they fire , it's quite a sensation .
But , we went cl ear to 400K--we went almos t t he 14
minutes before we had a horizon . We had the
ground in sight pr evious to this
Well , not much previous to this .
But we were looking at that scr ewy gray- -
Well , I 1 11 tell you , we fired them at Hawaii , and White
Sands was the first thing I s aw coming out of the termina
tor and that 's looking straight down . It was still black
r ight behind Whi t e Sands and no horizon looki ng at the
nose . But looking straight down , White Sands was the first
thing I saw . We still had a rather nebulous
horizon about 45 degrees out the window when we
crossed the Mississippi River , I had the
decided feeling that we were right on t he east
coast , but by this time the plasma was so bad tha t
I couldn ' t really tell . I had the decided feel ing
that we were crossing into the Atlantic Ocean by the
time that we had a full horizon out there .
Well , now I think our windows on this flight --! was

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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.