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. 3 …September 2, 1965 at the Crew Quarters, Cape Kennedy, Florida . Although all the material contained in…
  • p. 244 …48 -- wonder what that was -- East Africa, very hazy, African geology, Cape Kennedy , ice particles , and…
238
here again , I say I realize why we wer,= trying to
sal vage what we could out of a bad sit11ation but
it didn 1 t really do justice to the expt=riment . We
never r eally once really gave the expe:C'iment as far
as the ground observation, a really fa:Lr chance. And
the one time when we really did give it the most
fair chance, when we did have attitude control , was
extremely bad weather -- the haze was ·)ad -- it was
j ust about like the day when we went over it in
the airplane trying to do those observations , it was
a low sun angle and haze and the vis:Lbility in the
area was not real overly good . Pete ' s already
covered the window measurements checkli st . I think
that t his whole _experiment was very well laid down
and very well prepared for and that the people con
cerned with this experiment did a real fine job of •
it --
Conrad I have to make one comment though , I think that the
target size was small enough such that the target
itself , although it had the high contrast ratio with
the surrounding background , that they were looking
for , you know so it would stand out, was lost in the
acquiring -- in other words , th3.t thing was designed
for our close overhead work to see it , and therefore,

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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.