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On this day in space! Aug. 29, 1965: NASA's Gemini 5 breaks spaceflight duration record after 2 astronauts spent '8 days in a garbage can'
NASA astronauts Gordon Cooper and Pete Conrad spent "8 days in a garbage can" on the Gemini 5 mission in 1965.
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On Aug. 29, 1965, two NASA astronauts returned from their record-breaking Gemini 5 mission.
Astronauts Gordon Cooper and Pete Conrad spent eight days in Earth orbit, and for the first time, the United States set a world record for the duration of a crewed spaceflight.
The Gemini 5 mission launched on Aug. 21, 1965 atop a Titan II rocket from what was then the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station (now the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station) in Florida. While in orbit, the astronauts were supposed to test rendezvous capabilities and maneuvers using a pod that deployed from their spacecraft. But due to an electrical problem, they had to cancel those plans along with several science experiments.
Pete Conrad later called the mission "eight days in a garbage can," referring to the cramped quarters of the Gemini spacecraft.
Human spaceflight was still pretty new in 1965 when NASA's Gemini program was in full swing. The first crewed launch was just four years earlier, when Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin orbited Earth for just 108 minutes on Vostok 1.
By 1965, NASA's longest mission had run just 4 days, but the space agency needed missions at least twice as long if it was to send astronauts to the moon and back under Project Apollo.
That brings us to the Gemini 5 mission, which NASA envisioned as an endurance test to prove that astronauts could survive for eight days on a long trip to the moon and back.
Cooper commanded the flight with Conrad as pilot. (Their backup crew included future Apollo 11 moonwalker Neil Armstrong and Elliott See, both rookies at the time.) It was Cooper who designed the Gemini 5 mission patch, which featured a Conestoga wagon and the words "8 Days Or Bust," to celebrate the flight's endurance run.