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).

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job of keeping it damped . We were steady as rock
coming in there .
Cooper Of course, this is the way to do it.
Conrad They were firing all the way, and it doesn't
surprise me at all that we used all that fuel out
of Ring B. But Ring B, I know , wasn't put on
until the drogue was out. And I know t hat Ring B
had no fuel taken out of it except to test it
two orbits back. There are some 33 pounds in
Ring B, and there was 4.9 oxidizer and 4.6 fuel
left in Ring B. So, we shot almost 25 pounds of
fuel on the drogue.
Cooper Which is fine . You might as well use the fuel up
at that point . There's no sense in saving it.
Conrad Again, this tells me that up to drogue deployment
you might as well take that reentry rate command
and throw it away because the pilot i sn't going to
accept four degrees per second anyhow. He is
going to d.Q.mp before that. So , you might as
well use the wire for something else . Use rate
command, and if you fly the reentries just like
that , you've got more than adequate fuel in Ring
B to poop it away on the drogue and insure