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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The suit seemed to run pretty ,iry . I wasn ' t
conscious of any great amount of perspiration
in i t at all. A couple of tim1~s when we
had fairly heavy work loads I 1;as aware of
the feeling of cool air and folt
like it was drying sweat . CO2 . We got 2
or 3 indications of CO2 on the PCO2 gage .
One thing, whenever a station nends you a
calibrate, well, you get a big jump on that
gage but there were other timeB when we
weren ' t even near a stati on when that
gage came up and began to give an indication
and one time it gave such a poBitive
indication for quite a period of time that
we got a little concerned about i t because
it was right when all this other stuff was
'
going, on day 5 and we I d shut c.own control
systems had failed and we were destined for
3 deys of drifting and the PCOr started up .~
So we pulled out one of the ta;es , one of
the CO2 tapes that we had onboard . lt showed
it was below 2 nun of mercury, below that anyway.
It was this usually erroneous €:age . The
suit comfort is no darn good. It is worse than any
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