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).
“Mission Control”5 pages
278 Conrad Let me just add one thing. My recommendation is tha t you are going to have to be extremely careful with the mission planning people becau:rn I saw what happened to us . Every f l ight is going to have a different rendezvous. Somebody is going to want to start changing s omething, or mickey•-mousing around. I think it is going to wind u:;, to be a crew responsibility and that a couple of mo,~ths before the f light they really put the axe to them to stop. vlhether it is the best way to do it or not , the more you do in rendezvous, the more complicated it is and the more time critical it is doing the maneuvers . The computer is a complex little gadget and can really f oul you up if you make one mistake. '3o , training wise I can1 t emphasize running the mis3ion the way it is really going to run in real time. We haven't enough time to really get it down. Cooper Cut i t off at an early date , s o you ca1 adequately t rain on i t . I can't conceive that you could ever get the off-sets that we were using in some of our r etrofire training. Plus , I don ' t th~1k we are using the right torquing moments on our Rate Command system. The trainer doesn 1 t have anyw.~ere near the brute power that the actual RCS Rate CJmmand has .
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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.