I thought some of you might enjoy this. 3/23/15 is the 50th anniversary of the first manned Gemini flight, Gemini 3.
http://www.nasa.gov/externalflash/gemini_gallery/index.html
Very cool! Thanks for posting!
Gemini is so often forgotten between the pioneering efforts of Mercury and the glamorous missions of Apollo, but it was the program where we learned how to go to the moon. Gemini had a few near disasters along the way but they always got lucky (thanks to exceptional skill of all involved) and got the crews back. While I like the Mercury 7, a few of them were terrible astronauts. The group selected for Gemini, “The New Nine” were almost all exceptional astronauts. NASA learned what they needed and it showed in what they accomplished.
Amazing stuff. Thanks.
It is often forgotten, but not for those of us who lived through it. Those were exciting times.
For those who don’t know, the name Gemini refers to the constellation Gemini, also known as “the twins”. This was because there were two astronauts on board rather than the one astronaut aboard a Mercury capsule. Launching more than one person at a time was a new and very novel thing!
This was a step toward the three used in the Moon landings. I’m not certain if three, rather than two, were planned for the lunar landings at that time or if that was decided later.
In theory, one man could have landed by himself. The only absolute requirement was a second man remaining in orbit to make it possible to dock and come home.
I lived through it, but was too young to even know anything about it at the time. I do recall the Apollo missions though, but as a 7 year old even Apollo 11 didn’t really register with me till later. By Apollo 17 I was 10 and remember standing outside on a bright moonlit night and thinking “there are men on the moon right now” and being completely amazed by it all. I still am actually.
I was 13 during Apollo 11, so I remember that very clearly, as well as the Gemini program.
The space race was going on throughout my childhood and, probably like you, it seemed like a totally normal thing, just something governments did.
I don’t mean that it wasn’t amazing and extraordinary, it was and I knew it was; but it seemed like one of the normal functions of government was to do these amazing, extraordinary, audacious things, and that it would continue to do so at the same pace throughout my lifetime, eventually leading to Mars and who knows what else.
Then, after Apollo 17… 
The shuttle came awhile later, but that was really a step backwards.
My parents weren’t big space or science fans, but when the launches started, they’d get us up early in the morning to see them. They said “You will want to remember this.”
How do Americans pronounce “Gemini?” It’s always Gemin-eye here in Canada, but I’ve heard “gemin-ee” from the US. Is it a regional thing?
I’ve always said Gemin-eye and that’s how I’ve heard it. I don’t recall hearing anyone say gemin-ee.
Actually, this isn’t correct. The original proposed scheme for the crewed lunar program was Direct Ascent (DA), where a massive booster would propel a unitary crewed spacecraft which would land on the Lunar surface and then ascent and return to Earth with a crew of two. This would have required the conceptual Nova rocket which was in rough measure twice as powerful as the eventual Saturn V system. It was eventually determined that the Lunar Orbit Rendezvous (LOR) scheme, in which a separate crew module and lander would be boosted by a single launch vehicle into lunar orbit, with the lander landing and returning, would provide sufficient reliability and capability, would be the only practical approach despite the mass penalty of an additional crew member and complexity of additional stages: the orbiting Command/Service Module (CSM) and two stage Lunar Module(LM).
Note that the crewed vehicle in orbit was not strictly necessary; the LM ascent stage was still required to make intercept with the CSM and has considerable margin to achieve orbital rendezvous, and only concerns about being able to automatically actuate the docking mechanism drove the need to have a crew member aboard the CSM (which proved to be unnecessary). If the LM missed the rendezvous parameters with the CSM by more than its allowable margin there was probably little the CSM could do to interface with it and still make an effective Earth injection maneuver. Serious consideration was given to expanding LM capabilities to carry all three crew to the Lunar surface during proposed longer duration (tens of days beyond the 3-4 day “J-class” missions of the Apollo 15-17) so that the CSM pilot wasn’t “stranded” in orbit and get more functional workload.
Although the primary purpose of the Gemini program (actually initiated after the beginning of Apollo) was to test out technologies and methods in crewed spaceflight to support the Apollo program, there was a proposed alternative scheme using the Gemini system that would have provided LOR profile with a spacewalk to a skeletal lander/ascent vehicle. This would have necessitated a more abbreviated lunar excursion mission (basically, a brief walk around and ascent after a single orbit of the Gemini CSM) and a vastly reduced sample load, but would have achieved the basic mission which was to plant a flat and put footprints on the Moon’s surface. However, despite some notable setbacks with both the Saturn V booster development and the Apollo AS-204 fire, the Apollo/Saturn development proceeded sufficiently that the alternative Gemini proposals never went beyond paper stage. To a certain extent this is unfortunate, as the more cost effective Gemini approach might have permitted continued operation in the constrained, post-Lunar environment instead of the effectively six year hiatus between the last Apollo mission (the political fop Apollo-Soyuz Test Program mission) and the Space Transportation Program (‘Shuttle’) launches, and ultimately languishing in Near Earth Orbit mission profiles. However, the Von Braun-imagined schemes of Lunar and orbiting colonies to be reached by commercial shuttle services were, in retrospect, hopelessly optimistic in terms of both cost and political sustainment.
Stranger
Actually,no it was not.
I thought the LM capsule could barely carry two men with suits. Would they not have needed in essence a new ascent stage for that?
Thanks for the corrections and additional information.
Space and computers were still very much in their infancy at the time of Gemini. Spy satellites were around but not very good. We were launching them, they’d stay up for a while taking a pre assigned list of pictures on film, then return to Earth to be retrieved and developed. They were pretty unreliable. Clouds obscured pictures, the satellites wouldn’t recognize if something new happened on ground that they should photograph instead, and by the time pictures were developed things were already old news.
So, the Air Force came up with a plan to modify Gemini to become a base for manned reconnaissance. Secret astronauts were selected and trained in parallel with the more visible NASA astronauts. There were even talks of modifying the capsule to include some defensive measures like guns.
Spy Satellite technology advanced faster than expected and the plans to use Gemini for spy purposes became obsolete so the program was abandoned. Still interesting to know that there was a clandestine side to the public face of NASA at that time…
There’s a brief Wikipedia entry here: Manned Orbiting Laboratory - Wikipedia. There’s also a very interesting episode of NOVA that covers this program.
The whole moon project, from Mercury to Apollo, was at least partly driven by defense considerations. As I understand it, there was a fear that the Soviets would create a base on the moon for launching nukes and that we wouldn’t be able to strike such a base.
You would think that the doctrine of mutually assured destruction would have rendered this fear moot since we still could have retaliated against Soviet territory, and we’d have ample time to do so between a moon launch and impact.
The other thing that drove it was the ideological war between capitalism and communism. We wanted to prove to the world that capitalism would beat out communism in such an endeavor. It was ironic that we did so via a huge government program.
I hadn’t realized this limited LM approach was in consideration in the American lunar program. That particular mission profile is the one the Soviets were working toward for their moon landing program: the ЛК (LK, Lunniy Korabl – “Moon capsule” or “Moon ship”) one-man lander and Соыуз 7К-ЛОК (Soyuz LK-LOK Lunniy Orbitalny Korabl (“Lunar Orbital Craft”) two-man CSM. Complete with spacewalk for the lander crew member to board the LM.
Oh, I missed that Stranger already about the orbital laboratory … Sorry!
This concept was never developed beyond the conceptual stage because the good progress made on the LM development offered more capability (longer duration on the lunar surface, greater sample payload return) and robustness against failures. (Despite the ad hoc way it was presented in the Ron Howard movie, the use of thr LM as a ‘lifeboat’ in the case of environment systems failure has long been planned in the LM design.). By 1966 is was clear that the Apollo/Saturn system was workable for a Lunar landing mission (the 1967 Apollo AS-204 capsule fire and the pogo issues on both the S-IC and S-II stages notwithstanding) and further development of the Gemini system under NASA direction was formally ended with termination of Project Gemini after it successfully met the primary objectives of demonstrating extended crew operation in orbit, rendezvous and docking manuevers, and precision reentry and landing. McDonnell Douglas (the prime contractor for the Gemini spacecraft) continued to pitch adaptations and expansions of the Gemini system to both NASA and the USAF, including the infamous Manned Orbiting Laboratory, the abortive Blue Gemini Air Force program, and the Saturn INT-20/21 boosted ‘Big Gemini’ that could carry a crew of up to 12 people and a cargo/propulsion multi-mission module.
It is perhaps unfortunate that development of the Gemini system as a low cost ‘workhorse’ for orbital and logistical operations did not continue, as the cost of the program was a small fraction (less than 10%) of the more ambitious Apollo/Saturn program and would have ultimately served in that role better than the Apollo successor Space Transportation System (“Shuttle”), but there was little ambition or percevied need for two parallel civilian space programs, and as Frazzled noted, although the Air Force was interested in Gemini because of its low cost and use of the Titan launch vehicle, once remote satellite surveillance capabilities improved it was apparent that they would be more cost effective and operationally responsive than the MOL or other crewed facility.
Stranger
Some, if not most, of the astronauts pronounced it the latter.
Well, that was a long time ago so I’ve probably just forgotten.
Could Gemini have be restarted post Apollo to maintain a space programme while the Shuttle was being worked on?