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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wasted time down here trying to crank up some of
these launch failures that take quite a while to
reset on the GMS . We should have gone through them
on the DCPS and let them go at that. It was a
waste of valuable time during the last few days.
Many precious hours were wasted cranking the program
into the GMS to go through some of the failure modes
that we could have done in a tenth of the time on
the DCPS . Due to the shortage of time we cut way
back on nominal training. We could have had more
nominal launches, nominal insertions , nomina l
insertion checklist, nominal preretro , and nominal
re t ro, e tc .
Conrad The best day we had was the day before the act ual
flight . The day after we had scrubbed . We ran
about 8 nominal launches . About 4 reentries all
the way through to the end and that really put
the frosting on the cake.
Cooper Yes , we should have had another day of t hat before
the first attempted launch. As it turned out we
got into reasonable shape because of that one scrub
date . We really put it to good use.
Conrad We got a chance to go over the books some more and