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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Cooper
FCSD Rep
Cooper
FCSD Rep
in the middle of the States , like Dal l a s , For t
Worth , and J acksonville .
I tried some nighttime photographs with the 200 mm
l ens on high speed film with s ever al different
speed setti ngs just to see i f they would come out
and what they would come out like- -
Of what?
Oh, of Orion and s everal of the constella tions-
several celesti a l fixes--once of some airglow ,
I t ook a picture of that aurora that we saw over
there and , of cour se, all kinds of su~set s , sun
rises , and the moon coming up through the airglow,
and things of this type . A l ot of di:n light stuff
we took with hi gh speed fil m. It may or may not
come out , I don I t know . We were gues,3ing at some
of the exposures . A gr ea t many thi ng:3 on the ground,
of course, we took pictures of tha t w1~re unexpec t ed
things tha t we just thought were real t arget s of
oppor tunity.
Okay , that' s the end of the experimen·~s .