Gemini 5 Technical Debriefing, Part II, 1965

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259
Conrad
"
Cooper
Conrad
time for a period of 6 hours , at least.
I am firml y convinced the first three orbits shoul d
be devoted onl y to wringing the spacecraft out.
There was a tremendous mistake made in the pl anning
on our f l ight.
We assumed that everything was going
to run correctly in the very beginning.
We didn't
even test anything but the thrusters and that was
a mistake.
We had the time to make several systems
checks .
You have to do a good platform check. You
need to check the scanners.
You ought to have a de­
tailed procedure laid out in advance. If we ' d have
done that, we'd have lmown that the primary scanner was
no good.
You should have a computer check, which con­
sists of going into Catch- Up mode, hitting Start COMP,
maybe inserting a few numbers and see what they read
out.
We ran into one computer anomaly where the com­
puter kept running and running and I still don't lmow
what that was.
Had that occured during the REP exercise we would have
really been up the creek.
That's right. In pre- mission planning we should lmow
what the most critical systems are to be checked. For
us there was the Platform, Computer and Scanners. One
of them bit us and that was the Primary Scanner.
We