Minęło 55 lat od rekordowej wtedy misji Gemini 5.55 Years Ago: Gemini 5 Sets a New RecordAug. 28, 2020
Gemini 5 prime and backup crews during the preflight press conference, left to right, See, Conrad, Cooper, and Armstrong.The primary goals of Project Gemini included proving the techniques required for the Apollo Program to fulfill President John F. Kennedy’s goal of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to Earth before the end of the 1960s. The series of two-man Gemini flights followed the successful completion of Project Mercury that placed America’s first astronauts into orbit. Paramount among the techniques demonstrated during Project Gemini was rendezvous and docking necessary to implement the Lunar Orbit Rendezvous method NASA chose for the Moon landing mission. Additional goals of Gemini included proving that astronauts could work outside their spacecraft during spacewalks, or Extravehicular Activities (EVA), and ensuring that spacecraft and astronauts could function for at least
eight days, considered the minimum time for a roundtrip mission to the Moon.
The first two Gemini missions flew without a crew to validate the spacecraft’s design and reliability, especially of its heat shield. Astronauts Virgil I. Grissom, the first person to enter space twice, and John W. Young flew the first Gemini mission to carry a crew, Gemini 3. During their three-orbit flight, they validated the spacecraft’s life support systems and performed the first orbital maneuvers, critical for future rendezvous missions. Astronaut Edward H. White completed the first American EVA during Gemini 4, and along with James A. McDivitt he completed a four-day flight that was the longest American mission up to that time. The primary goal of Gemini 5 was to fly in space for eight days, proving that astronauts and their spacecraft could function for the expected duration of a lunar landing mission. The extended duration meant that the spacecraft could no longer rely on just batteries for power but instead used fuel cells that produced electricity by combining hydrogen and oxygen, creating water as a byproduct. At eight days, Gemini 5 would spend more time in space than all previous American missions combined. A rendezvous simulation test was also part of Gemini 5’s mission plan, as were a series of scientific experiments. (...)
Four views of the Earth taken by the Gemini 5 crew. Cape Canaveral, Florida, left, Baja California, Mexico, Salton Sea,
southern California, and the Straits of Gibraltar, with Spain at top left and Morocco at bottom right.Conrad, left, and Cooper cut the cake baked in their honor by the crew of the USS Lake ChamplainCooper and Conrad give a speech to the House of Representatives(...) From Washington, DC, starting on Sept. 15 Cooper and Conrad and their families embarked on a 13-day six-nation goodwill tour to Greece, Turkey, Ethiopia, the Malagasy Republic, Kenya, and Nigeria, with a final rest stop in the Canary Islands, assigned to them by President Johnson. At a State Department luncheon prior to their departure, attended by ambassadors from the six countries they would visit, Cooper said that from Gemini 5 “you don’t see any of the combat, you don’t see any of the fighting and bickering, the world looks like a very peaceful place.” During their stop in Athens, they attended the International Astronautical Congress and met with the crew of Voskhod 2, Soviet cosmonauts Pavel I. Belyayev and Aleksei A. Leonov, who completed the first walk in space six months earlier. During their goodwill tour, NASA assigned Conrad as the backup Command Pilot for Gemini 8. Cooper and Conrad returned to Houston on Sept. 28. (...)
https://www.nasa.gov/feature/55-years-ago-gemini-5-sets-a-new-record'You Ready, Rookie?' Remembering Gemini V, OTD in 1965By Ben Evans, on August 21st, 2020
Gemini V crewmen Gordon Cooper (right) and Charles “Pete” Conrad. Photo Credit: NASA(...) Preparations for Gemini V had already seen Conrad gain, then lose, the chance to make a spacewalk. In early plans for the mission, the Gemini IV pilot would depressurize the spacecraft’s cabin, open the hatch and stand on his seat, with an actual “egress”—a true Extravehicular Activity (EVA)—slated for Gemini V. But following the surprise spacewalk by Soviet cosmonaut Alexei Leonov in March 1965, the U.S. spacewalk was correspondingly moved forward to Gemini IV. As a result, devoid of any EVA, Cooper and Conrad’s mission came to be grimly known by the two men as “Eight Days in a Garbage Can”, for they would be required to simply “exist” for a week in orbit and demonstrate that they could at least survive long enough for a minimum-duration round trip to the Moon. (...)
https://www.americaspace.com/2020/08/21/you-ready-rookie-remembering-gemini-v-otd-in-1965/