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).
259 Conrad " Cooper Conrad time for a period of 6 hours , at least . I am firml y convinced the first three orbits shoul d be devoted onl y to wringing the spacecraft out . There was a tremendous mistake made in the pl anning on our f l ight. We assumed that everything was going to run correctly in the very beginning. We didn't even test anything but the thrusters and that was a mistake. We had the time to make several systems checks . You have to do a good platform check. You need to check the scanners . You ought to have a de tailed procedure laid out in advance. If we ' d have done that, we'd have lmown that the primary scanner was no good. You should have a computer check, which con sists of going into Catch- Up mode, hitting Start COMP, maybe inserting a few numbers and see what they read out . We ran into one computer anomaly where the com puter kept running and running and I still don't lmow what that was. Had that occured during the REP exercise we would have really been up the creek. That's right. In pre- mission planning we should lmow what the most critical systems are to be checked. For us there was the Platform, Computer and Scanners . One of them bit us and that was the Primary Scanner. We
Not linked to a story yet.
Official release, from the pursue collection. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is under it. 325 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.