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).

FCSD Rep
Cooper
Conrad
Conrad
Cooper
Conrad
everything was settled down . The Horizon Scanner
.was working at that point . It quit working properly
after we turned to yaw right . We had already gone
into Orbital Rate, so we could care less about the
scanner at this point . We got it alined, and we ' re
already in Orbital Rate . We yawed right , got squared
away and 15 seconds late ejected the REP on the
IVI's all zeroed . We then used a couple of DIRECT
pulses , zipped back around , picked it up going around
to the 270. It was going right straight out to 270
on our ball . We could see the REP light whenever we
were passing through the 90 degree point . On my side,
I could see it flashing on the nose . By the time we
got around it was in quite close, we could see it
going out with a very slow tumble rate, flashing .
What would you estimate the tumble rate to be?
It was tumbling very slowly, I would say maybe a
half to 1 degree per second .
I 1d say a degree per second.
I couldn't tell what it was in roll . It didn't seem
to be tumbling in more than 2 axes .
That was ha.rd to tell .
When I saw it , you could see the dipole come around .
We couldn 1 t tell anything about roll, but it was not

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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.