Project Gemini: A Bridge to the Moon

Video from the channel The Royal Institution about Project Gemini, linked on its Above Ten Thousand entry. Duration: 6:05. Language: English. Video type: Documentary.

A piece by the Royal Institution, from its 2015 series "A Place Called Space." Using archival footage and audio, it tells the story of Project Gemini as an intermediate step between Mercury and Apollo.

After Mercury, and with the presidential commitment to reach the Moon before the decade was out, NASA had to develop the technology and procedures for the journey and train its personnel. Gemini was born in 1961 for that purpose, at a time when the United States was behind the Soviet Union. On March 18, 1965, the Soviet Alexei Leonov carried out the first spacewalk.

The capsules, built by McDonnell Aircraft Corporation and designed by Jim Chamberlain, carried two crew members, hence the name. Gemini was the first spacecraft of modular design and the first with an onboard computer, the Gemini Guidance Computer. Between March 1965 and November 1966, ten crewed missions were launched from Cape Kennedy. Gemini 4 sent the first American outside the spacecraft. The exhaustion caused by the early spacewalks was solved through Buzz Aldrin's underwater training. In August 1965, Gemini 5 reached the eight days required for a lunar voyage, and Gemini 7 surpassed it with nearly two weeks in orbit. The video also recalls the compressed space food and the sandwich John Young smuggled aboard Gemini 3. It closes with the first space rendezvous between Gemini 6A and Gemini 7, shortly before Christmas 1965, and the crew's Christmas prank with a harmonica.