Gemini 5

The crew passed over their launch site during the mission and captured this shot of the Kennedy Space Centre.

After the excitement of achieving the first space rendezvous, even though it was with a phantom target, the crew were reduced to gliding through space after some of the atitude control thrusters failed. The spacecraft was reported as tumbling end-over-end at twice a minute, but this would increase if left unchecked.

Cooper said of the drifting through space: "You'd wake-up in the morning, pull the little curtain up on the window, and the world would be whipping-by at a great rate in all three axes."

Towards the end of the flight the Gemini spacecraft was struck by a number of meteorite's during the annual meteorite shower in late August. After the flight a number of indentations were found in the spacecraft's hull, luckily the impacts were made by objects no bigger than a grain of sand otherwise the mission could have come to a very abrupt end.

Gemini V

All space patches worn by astronauts during space flights originate from this patch designed by Cooper for the Gemini V mission in 1965. It should be noted that NASA administrator James Webb had requested that the slogan "8 days or Bust" should be covered up just in case the mission failed to go the distance.

In a NASA memo this type of patch, to be worn by astronauts, was called the Cooper patch and although there does exist patches for the Mercury and early Gemini missions, these are for collectors only and were designed long after the missions had flown.

Gordon Cooper and Charles Conrad were chosen as the prime crew for the Gemini V mission.

Cooper during suiting up operations for the Gemini V launch.

Cooper leads the way to space

1st on time US space launch
1st use of fuel cell power supply
1st use of on board rendezvous system
1st rendezvous with a fixed point in space
1st man into orbit twice
1st all-up computer-guided re-entry
New US altitude record
New world space duration record

The Gemini V crew arrive at the launch pad suited up and ready to go.

Cooper salutes the pad crew leader in the white room shortly before insertion into the spacecraft.

The cramped cockpit of Gemini V home to the two men for the next 8 days. Cooper sits in the left hand seat with Conrad on his right, they are waiting for the hatches to be closed and the seals to be checked before the final checks are made before launch.

Seen through the hatch window, Gordo Cooper waits for the countdown to reach zero.

With a successful launch aboard Gemini V Gordon Cooper became the first man to go into orbit twice and after completing a total of 120 orbits of the Earth he became the most experienced space traveller at the time with a total of over 3,583,469 miles from his 2 flights.

Gemini V was launched from launch complex 19 on the 21st of August 1965 with the objective of remaining in orbit for 8 days.

Other mission objectives included flight-testing the new fuel cell power system and rendezvous and manoeuvring tests with a rendezvous pod to evaluate the guidance and control systems.

Cooper said of the launch: "The Titan II was much smoother than the Atlas, but the Atlas was a real hotrod, of course. From standing flat on the pad to getting into orbit, it only took you five minutes - so you were really hauling it. Having said that, you had a lot more oscillation and vibration and so on through that very thin-skinned booster. The Titan was a bigger, heavier booster and was considerably smoother in that respect."

Once in space Cooper reported back to Earth: "It feels mighty good. It's been a long time getting back...everything is going fine."

A member of the close out crew in the white room holds onto Conrad's portable life support system as he swings into his seat inside the spacecraft.

The erector tower is lowered on a clear Florida morning to expose the gleaming silver Titan rocket with the Gemini V spacecraft on top.

Gemini V achieved orbit carrying the first fuel cells, a 76lb Radar Evaluation Pod (REP) for later exercises with the guidance and navigation (G&N) systems, also being carried for the first time, and reaching a new US record height of 217 miles.

It wasn't long before the oxygen pressure dropped in the fuel cell system causing the astronauts to agree with the ground that a limited 1 day mission be flown with a later review of the power supply. The next day the cause of the failure, a heater, had corrected itself and the astronauts were given the go ahead for a limited trial of the G&N systems. Although the REP exercise was cancelled after its ejection on the second orbit, Conrad had spotted it 5 hours after launch at a distance of 609 metres and it had also been picked up when on the 14th orbit Cooper had switched on the rendezvous radar. The spacecraft radar gave a separation distance of 167 miles whilst the ground-based radar gave the distance as 170 miles, it had been originally planned for Gemini V to back off 52 miles and then rendezvous with the REP but now experts in Houston were planning a rendezvous with a phantom target in orbit instead. The accuracy of the on-board radar was a good omen for future flights when it would be needed to get a spacecraft within visual distance of its target.

On day 3 the crew began a 40,000 mile-chase of the phantom target that existed only in ground based computers in a 140 x 210mile orbit. Cooper became the first man to perform a rendezvous in space when after several manoeuvres, over 2 orbits, they achieved an orbit of 124 x 193 miles, this was more accurate than the estimated orbit the ground thought the crew would achieve.

Cooper said of the rendezvous task: "We have learned that this rendezvous is anything but a snip. There's a great deal of complexity." Both crewmembers agreed that day 3 was the highlight of the mission.

The crew became tired as the mission wore on because of the one man awake rule which meant that as one man slept his buddy in the opposite seat would be rattling round the spacecraft making noise and leading to a disturbed sleep period. Cooper said: "Initially, we were trying to let one man sleep and one man work, but that just didn't work at all because one would keep the other awake with the noise. In those small confines, rattling paper - even writing with a pencil - was enough. We got rather weary of that and on one particular day we both came whistling over the horizon sound asleep at the same time. Finally, we revamped our whole schedule where we would both sleep at the same time. That was a help."

Towards the end of the mission Cooper got to speak to his fellow Mercury astronaut Scott Carpenter working 205 feet below the Pacific Ocean near California aboard the Sealab 2 scientific submersible.

700 miles northeast of Hawaii the crew fired up the re-entry thrusters and burned a hole in the atmosphere towards their recovery vessel although Hurricane Betsy had caused a change to their splashdown point in the Atlantic Ocean. Cooper had performed his second manual re-entry after incorrect data had been fed into the on-board computer, this glitch had been in the software of Gemini's 3 and 4 but these flights had not lasted long enough for it to be noticeable.

Cooper explains: "It turns out, the ground had loaded the wrong values in. The value they'd loaded in for the Earth's rotation was a full 360 degrees per revolutions you made per day, times eight days. It added up to be one hell of an error in there in fact the Earth's only rotating 359.997 degrees per day, so they were off by 0.003 per revolution, which - cumulatively - was a long way out, of course."

Cooper was very interested in the space science side of things and had agreed to a full range of experiments being carried aboard Gemini V which included spotting objects from space, cardiovascular conditioning and terrain and weather photography.

On day 5 the crew were allowed to power up their spacecarft again to perform manoeuvres which would allow them to make observations of the Earth. They saw 2 Minuteman rockets blasting off from Vandenberg AFB in California, Cooper said of the first launch on their 46th orbit: "We got a beautiful view of it. We saw it light up and we could see it come up off the pad and watched it through its whole trajectory. It was a very spectacular launch from our viewpoint."

They also spotted the wake of their recovery vessel steaming along on the Atlantic Ocean and a rocket sled test at Holloman AFB.

Cooper said: "It definitely was a long, long time to spend confined in such a small space, and time does tend to get a little longer, but we had dozens of experiments to get through - and what with the thruster problem, we had to work extra hard getting the spacecraft into the right positions to get some of them done."

Cooper passed Bykovsky's record, set on Vostok 5, to become the most experienced space traveller and more significantly put America ahead in the space race for the first time, as one newspaper said after the mission: "Man has got what it takes to fly to the moon and back. Now for the moon shot."

Cooper exits the spacecraft into the sunshine, a welcome change from the cockpit of the Gemini spacecraft.

Splashdown had occurred on August 29th 1965 in the Atlantic Ocean, 14 minutes later it was spotted by a patrol plane and only 30 minutes after splashdown frogmen were securing the flotation collar.

Cooper rides the winch up to the waiting recovery helicopter. Owing to the off target splashdown, the astronauts were picked up and transferred to the recovery ship instead of staying inside the spacecraft because of the time it would now take for it to be recovered..

Surrounded by the USS Lake Champlain's crew the triumphant astronauts strode across the deck to a hero's welcome.

As the bearded astronauts joked, Conrad's wife, watching the scene on TV, said: "Frankenstein meets the Wolf Man."

Upon return to Earth the crew were given a medical examination to determine the effects of long periods of weightlessness on a flight lasting the same amount of time as a future lunar landing mission.

Below decks the pair had one more duty to perform, they removed the strip of silk to expose the slogan:
"8 days or Bust."

After re-scheduling Gemini V is launched right on time, another first for the US space program.

So for the second time Gordon Cooper had flown a highly successful mission proving that when it came to flying in space he was as good as any of his fellow astronauts.

Cooper said of his flight: "It was a long flight, but it was necessary in order to test all those things that had to be tested. Looking back, I still think very fondly of it."

Surely an Apollo command was the next step, thus ending his NASA career with the recognition he deserved as one of its top astronauts.

Gordo Cooper faces the press after Gemini V

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The impression of Gemini V is of 2 men in a powered down spacecraft spending 8 days drifting around the Earth. Not surprisingly Gemini V sometimes becomes the forgotten mission of the Gemini program, but the truth, however, is far removed from that. Gemini V was a mission of many firsts and accomplishments and one that took the US space program ahead of their rivals, the Soviets.

Artist's impression of the REP in Earth orbit

At one point Conrad sang "Over the ocean, over the blue, here's Gemini 5 singing to you!"

Gemini V serenely orbits above the planet; Cooper was able to see fine details on the Earth from space aboard his first flight, with his second flight he wanted to prove that he had been right in his observations of the Earth. Here the crew captured images of Baja California, the Himalayan Mountain Range and the Straits of Gibraltar.

Mission Facts

Launch date: 21th August 1965
Launch site: Pad 19, Cape Kennedy, USA
Launch vehicle: Titan II
Spacecraft weight: 7949lb
Flight time: 7 days 22hr 55min 14sec
Splashdown: 29th August 1965

On to Cooper Versus Shepard