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).
23 Conrad We didn't hit the direct thrusters long enough to heat them I don't think. I do distinctly remember saying to Gordo "We blew all this junk out of there . " Conrad We ' d never seen anything like that before and we'd been up there 5 days and seen all sorts of things . We could see liquid oxygen when we vented it, if we vented i t under the right light conditions . We could see when we vented hydrogen under the right lighting conditions. It would all float by the spacecraft and at low sun angles, either at sunup or sundown any one of these quantities, ECS o2, CRYO o2, or RSF hydrogen, you could see it come whistling by the spacecraft. We were continually floating around in these old silver balls of either hydrogen or oxygen. Cooper Okay, well that was pretty well the background of what happened. Some thrusters that had checked out good would subsequently check out bad or be completely inoperative as the days went by. So finally we wound up with maybe half of the total OAMS thrusters still operating properly.
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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.