Documents / Official release
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).
“Cape Kennedy”2 pages
240 left out the one thing that reall y made -- just like being in the desert -- you are flying along out there over the desert and a very , very small ·;hink road s t ands out and the reason it does , is because it ' s got the r i ght contr ast ratio . You can put a 6 foot road in brown in a brown field and you ' r e not going to see it from 100 feet in the air. And t his was . the whole trouble. The targets were to small that their contrast ratio didn ' t help us acquire. I feel the experiment was really a good one . I re~lly feel badly about not getting the data , but ~1 opinion hasn ' t changed from before flight -- I ·,ras worried before flight that the contrast was gob.g to be such that we would never locate it and that was exactly what our problem was . Now the Woodleigh s i te , I feel might have been a little bit different: We had such a good sighting cue in that Sharksmouth Bay, and there was no doubt in our mind where the target was the one time we saw it with t he smoke and in relation to Sharksmouth Bay, and eve:cything that if we had had some fuel up there, we ve:cy well may have seen those targets far enough out t o acquir e the s i te and start t r acking and then we might have gotten them some useful dat a . No doubt in our mind that we'd lu€0MFIDE~fFJAL
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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.