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
Conrad
Cooper
Conrad
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Cooper
the load . It shouldn I t be any problem to
fix a couple of things like that . There ' s no
doubt about it, those fuel cells can go up and
down, and up and down under load and they will ha.ck
the course. We sure gave them a beating. Especially
that Number 2 fuel cell .
Can ' t say enough about the fuel cells . I just think
they did real well. I was extremely impressed at the
end when we kept loading them down. We loaded them
down even more and the doggone thing began to come
up rather than fail, go down or poop completely out .
That thing stayed on sixty o~ seventy hours of the
whole flight . That ' s a lot . It must have been
sixty hours at least .
I think that the fuel cell really goes into a
hybernation period when you cool it down . I think
it almost hibernates like a storage battery.
The way to bring it back to life is to load it down
to get it warmed up , and then to purge it . And I
would have liked to super purge that Number 2 cell
a couple of times to see if I couldn't have brought
it up higher.
Yes , I think it probably would have wor ked. The