Project Gemini

Now, you saw the Mercury capsule.

Did you ever see up, I'm sure you have, up close the Gemini capsule?

Uh, I've s- uh, I've seen, uh, one of the Gemini, I think it was Gemini VIII in, um, the California s- uh, Museum of Science and Industry.

Oh, a- and also there was one at the Air and Space Museum.

A- and I always, when I see the ca- the cabin of those things, and I got to sit in a simulator once years ago, I, I try to imagine spending two weeks in there without being able to even stretch out your legs-

And during our first season, we had, uh, a museum quality replica of the, of the Apollo command module-

Ah

... which according to the astronauts, it was much more spacious than the Mercury or, or Gemini, uh, capsules.

The X-5, thank you.

And then they were all, you know, everybody in the Mercury or the Gemini projects were all, you said, fighter jocks, because they needed to be, because they were, what was it, spam in a can? I think it was that they were...

Yeah, that's

right.

Wide shots would have to be wires, like, like 2001, and, and that was gonna be very limiting.

To name-drop a little bit, one day I was talking, I was on the Universal lot, and Steven Spielberg said, "How are you gonna do the weightlessness?" And I said, "Well, we're kind of struggling with it." And, and he said, uh, "Well, you know, I saw some NASA footage once where they bolted the Gemini capsule down, and then they went up in this plane and created this sort of, uh, zero G, and the astronauts would open the hatch and practice EVAs." And, uh, he said, "Y- you know, that would be kind of interesting." So I went to Jim Lovell and I said, "Spielberg told me about this thing." He said, "Oh, yeah, the vomit comet." He said, "It's brutal.

It's really brutal." He said, "But yeah, that, that works." NASA wasn't interested in us, you know, testing that idea, but there was a, a mothballed Russian [laughs] plane, uh, this is in '94, and we thought maybe we could charter that, but then we, we thought better of that, and insurance wouldn't cover it, and that was wise.

And so then, so then Jim Lovell himself-

We'll see where you go with this.

This feels very much like, you know, Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, the space shuttle, and now SpaceX.

It's like once upon a time we didn't even have the math to get out of Earth's, uh, gravitational pull, let alone orbit the Earth and then get to the moon.

We don't even know, we don't know what we don't know yet, and I think so many people are expecting answers and as if, oh, we've figured something out.

And these Saturn 1B rockets didn't just appear out of nowhere.

They were developed and used during, they were modified versions of rockets used in Project Gemini.

This was 10 missions that took place, crewed flights, all testing different aspects of flight that was required for a lunar landing.

They did things in low Earth orbit, such as rendezvous, docking spaceships together.