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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I'll tell you I wouldn ' t have given you a nickels
chance if we didn ' t have up systems. We would have
had to fallen back on one of those backup jobber
doos . That would have been pure luck. Eut I
wouldn't have made a mistake reading it. You are
just reading the checklist. They were extremely
complicated and long-winded. Now I guess they
simplified this a lot in Spacecraft 6; we were up
against the wall. We had to stop somewhere ; take it
and work with it or we weren't going to get it
done . They were still in the process or ironing
out the procedures. We did more of an eva luation,
although it was a learning process, but we were
involved in the evaluati on stage , which was not the
time for us to be doing this.