With this flight, the US finally took the manned spaceflight endurance record from Russia, while demonstrating that the crew could survive in zero gravity for the length of time required for a lunar mission. However the mission was incredibly boring, the spacecraft just drifting to conserve fuel most of the time, and was 'just about the hardest thing I've ever done' according to a hyperactive Pete Conrad. An accident with freeze dried shrimp resulted in the cabin being filled with little pink subsatellites.
Official NASA Account of the Mission from On the Shoulders of Titans: A History of Project Gemini, by Barton C. Hacker and Charles C. Alexander, Published as NASA Special Publication-4203 in the NASA History Series, 1977.
Although NASA Headquarters refused to allow nicknames for Gemini spacecraft, Cooper was not so easily put off. Conrad's father-in-law had whittled a model covered wagon, which inspired Cooper with the idea of a patch using that motif and the motto: "Eight days or bust." A personal appeal to NASA Administrator Webb led, after much discussion, to approval of the "Cooper patch." But Webb heartily disliked the motto - if the mission did not go the full eight days, for whatever reason, many would say it had "busted" - and turned it down.
On Saturday, 21 August, Guenter F. Wendt, the McDonnell pad leader, hustled Cooper and Conrad into their couches. Precisely at 9:00 a.m., they felt the modified Titan II start them on a far longer journey than any made by a bygone, continent-crossing covered wagon. The start was smooth enough but then came the bumps of Pogo. A few seconds before staging, the bouncing stopped. Gemini V cut loose from the booster's second stage at 163 kilometers altitude, with an orbital apogee of 349 kilometers.
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