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).

~liUiiAL 17
i s when we found the two thrusters that were not
operating correctly.
Conr ad 'Ille number 8 thruster was working real good when we
found that the number 7 thruster was out. So we
shut the sys tem down again and had a big talk with
Houston about this . We went one more revolution
and they gave us some tests to perform on 7 and
that 's when we di scovered 8 wasn ' t working.
Conrad 'lwo of them quit , within an orbit of one another.
Cooper We had already run complete tests on it and
number 8 had been working on the previous tests and
quit on the next one. 'Ille story of the old OAMS
inflight system was that gradually as the days went
by there was more , and more that went wrong with
it unti l f i nally at the end we had less than half
the thrusters left and they were pretty bad.
Conrad I realized a couple of heater blankets were probably
out on the OAMS system, but I'm still convinced
unt i l somebody convi nces me otherwise, that the
thing that shot the OAMS system down, was the
decision to turn off the OAMS heater. I had ques
ioned the decision in the air to only point that