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. 119 …Waste disposal- pack harder. Yes . Pack tighter. That's a very grave problem, in the f…
  • p. 231 …It gets harder the higher they get. Especi ally the second stage. I got the first…
burned out again and then he was gone . We could
have t r acked him through second stage. If you
are going to get hi m on IR you better get him
coming off the pad because after that you can ' t
follow them very well with the naked eye. We had
two entirely different lighting conditions .
The first day we had them against the clouds and the
second day we had them against the land and water.
Cooper We had him against that one string of clouds.
We lost him going against those clouds . If you
had a solid land water background I think you could
fo l low him the whole way without any problem .
Conrad The f irst day he didn ' t come up out of the clouds
but he did to us. You know it was clear at Vandenburg
but the clouds were close enough to cut off our
angular view. First , we saw him when he--
Cooper But we had good lighting conditions in spite of
his being above the clouds. The lighting wa s such
that we could foll ow him real easy.
Conrad But the second day I was looking right at the pad ,
and I saw the engine light . There ' s no two ways
about it, I saw the engine light or whatever the
fire was coming out of the hole . I don ' t know how
they fired them , but f r om the time that flame 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.