Documents / Official release

Gemini 5 Technical Debriefing, Part II, 1965

National Aeronautics and Space Administration · 1965 · 325 pages · text from the file's own layer

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).

Conrad
Cooper
Conrad
FCSD Rep
Cooper
Conrad
Conrad
Cooper
31
I thought it held to about a degree and a half .
Not in yaw , you remember . It allowed yaw to wander
off by probably a good 10 degrees there. Remember
it allowed right yaw to wander off by about 10 degrees
and just sit off there in right yaw several times.
It wouldn't even bring it back.
Yes . That was the trouble .
Do you think this had anything to do with your con
trol problem?
W-ell, it may have been . It may have been that con
trol was somewhat intermittent right there . I don ' t
know, but it might have been . But Rate Command sure
worked good using those same controls.
Yes . I suspect that being the first time that it
was cranked up since spacecraft number 2 , it may not
have been tweeked as well as it could have been.
It certainly didn't work like it did on the simulator ,
I ' ll put it that way.
It didnlt work properly, and it was no good the way
it was. We never used it after we originally tried
it out and after we 1 d tried doing this one burn on it
to see if it would hold. The one that it did hold
on, our first perigee adjust, it held beautifully.
During the next one, it got so bad it wasn I t any

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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.