He noted that the scrutiny was due to the new, untested procedures planned for the upcoming flight. “Extremely rigid specifications were tightened even further for Gemini 5, and inspection procedures were more stringent than those previously used.” “A great deal of knowledge was gained during the four previous Gemini missions, particularly the two manned flights,” Gay said in a 1965 interview. The capsule then was flown to Kennedy for another eight weeks of prelaunch checkouts. He and a team of specialists conducted nine weeks of capsule factory tests and inspections at the McDonnell Aircraft Corp. The Florida spaceport’s NASA test conductor for Gemini V was Chuck Gay. He would go on to command Gemini 11 in 1966, walk on the moon during Apollo 12 in 1969 and lead the first Skylab crew in May and June 1973.Īs flights became longer and more complex, the NASA team at the Kennedy Space Center and Cape Kennedy (now Cape Canaveral) Air Force Station intensified its efforts to ensure mission success. Conrad was a member of the agency’s second group of astronauts. In addition to efforts to determine microgravity’s effects after more than a week in orbit, the crew of Gordon Cooper and first-time astronaut Charles “Pete” Conrad planned to attempt to catch up with an instrument package called the rendezvous evaluation pod (REP).Ī member of the original seven Mercury astronauts, Cooper flew more than 34 hours and orbited the Earth 22 times on Mercury 9 during May 1963. This knowledge is crucial as NASA looks toward human journeys to and from Mars, which could last 500 days or longer. With the doubling of the length of the usual ISS stay, researchers hope to better understand how the human body reacts and adapts to longer-duration spaceflight. Now, 50 years after Gemini V, NASA astronaut Scott Kelly and Russian cosmonaut Mikhail Kornienko are in the midst of a one-year stay in orbit aboard the space station. These new capabilities allowed astronauts not only to meet the challenges for landing on the moon, but laid the groundwork for long-duration missions aboard the International Space Station and future flights to destinations that still await, such as a near-Earth asteroid and Mars. One of the lasting benefits of NASA’s Gemini Program was its sustained technological investments accumulated over a two-year period. It also tested technology that would help make longer missions possible in the future. The eight-day Gemini V endurance mission doubled America’s spaceflight record set two months earlier. During the summer of 1965, the United States began to pull even in the space race with the Soviet Union.
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