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. 270 …check the scanners . You ought to have a de tailed procedure laid out in advance. If…
  • p. 302 …With the accurate star chart updated and then finding the stars on there , then you could…
256 ~ WFIDel>~TIAL
12.4 Mission Rules
Cooper
Conrad
12.5 Experiments
Cooper
be held to an absolute minimum.
I think that the mission rules were i n general very
heal thy. I think the attitude of the FOD toward
mission rules was very good. It was obvious that
just as we have seen many times before, that FOD
uses the mission rul es as guidelines and certainly
wil l deviate from them to keep the f l ight going, but
keep everything as safe and as smooth as possible.
I real ly can ' t quibble with the mission rules we
wound up with at all . I think they were very good.
The mission rules on the fuel cells were the best
things we ever had, they were written real opera
tionall y. I would l ike to compliment the people
who wrote those rules .
Experiments is a sore point with me b<?cause I again
feel like the flight crew get trompled on all the
way down the l ine. There is no polic;r that has ever
been held to or ever backed up on adhBring to an
experiments cut-off date. Very obviously, there
were a couple of experiments thrown in on a politi
cal basis and nothing else . I feel that this is not
fair to the experimenters and to the flight crew,
I

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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.