'8 Days or Bust' +50: Gemini 5 Made History with 1st Crew Mission Patch

Fifty years ago on Monday (Aug. 24), two NASA astronauts were more than one-third of the way through what was destined to be the world's longest space mission at the time. Gordon Cooper and Charles "Pete" Conrad, seated snugly in the U.S. space agency's third-manned Gemini capsule, had launched atop a Titan II rocket from Cape Canaveral on Aug. 21, 1965. Cooper, who two years earlier had flown on the longest of NASA's one-man Mercury missions, was now the first person to fly into orbit twice.