Project Gemini

The Soviet cosmonauts had legroom and a toilet.

After Mercury, the US moved on to Gemini, a spacecraft with two crew members.

The Soviet Union's answer was Voskhod.

an evolution of Vostok using the same cabin design.

In 1964, the Soviet space program squeezed three cosmonauts into a Voskhod capsule to score another win, although the crew didn't have room to wear spacesuits.

Then, in 1965, they launched Voskhod 2, fitted with an inflatable airlock that enabled Alexei Leonov to perform the first spacewalk, and this would mark the apex of the Soviet space program's lead over the West.

However, the American Gemini spacecraft also had the ability to maneuver in space, and this had enabled its rendezvous and docking capabilities.

The Voskhod design had enabled a couple of Soviet firsts without really advancing Soviet spacecraft capabilities.

There's an

astronaut there, and he's talking about the Mercury and Gemini flights, which had just happened.

And I liked that he was the one that Regan is like, you're going to die.

I was like, in a spaceship?

Space Shuttle was obviously modeling this and studying the dynamics of these tethers.

Another example from the early days would be the Gemini mission where they hooked a lasso or hooked a line around the Agena and the Gemini and they sort of just moved around in a circle to show that yes, you can in fact do this.

But yes, the longest spacecraft ever made by tether is the yes to spacecraft and it deployed more than 30 kilometers of tether or about um you know 20 miles or something like that 16 miles it's lots right so Yeah, the YES-2 spacecraft.

YES stands for Young Engineering Satellite, and it was a European Space Agency project.

Ham's spacecraft lasted only a short time in space.

The engineering lessons extracted from it continued for decades, passing from Mercury into Gemini, Apollo, space stations, and commercial flight.

His 6 minutes and 39 seconds became one small entry in a much larger record written into the machinery that carries humans away from Earth.

From an altitude of roughly 250 kilometers, or about 157 miles, Earth begins to reveal a shape impossible to appreciate from its surface.

Among numerous Soviet achievements, it was a cosmonaut who was the first human to orbit the Earth and another to first conduct extravehicular activity.

The US Mercury and Gemini programs achieved their objectives of developing and flight testing the kinds of equipment and procedures that would be needed in a lunar mission.

But in 1967, with less than three years remaining before the deadline set by President Kennedy, fire broke out in the pure oxygen environment of the Apollo 1 command module during a ground test, resulting in the death of the three astronauts on board.

Despite the delay from the accident and its aftermath, on July 20th, 1969, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin of Apollo 11 became the first humans to set foot on a celestial body beyond our own while Mike Collins orbited above preparing for the return to Earth.

The committee examined the technical feasibility of utilizing a commercial service to transport crew to low Earth orbit.

First, it is a statement of fact that all of the U.S. crew launch systems built to date have been built by industry for NASA.

The system under contemplation is not much more complex than a modern Gemini, which was built by U.S. industry over 40 years ago.

It would consist of a three- or four-person crew taxi launched on a rocket with a launch escape system.

And then we decided to stick two missiles together.

So the first one's called Mercury, the second was Gemini.

And we said, look, how about we do multi-stage and then we see if we can get into orbit.

And then we did Apollo after we did Mercury and Gemini.

And then we said, let's do three stages and let's try and get into orbit and let's try and get around the moon.

And we just incrementally added capability and incrementally learned, incrementally debugged what was right and what was wrong.