Things were not going well for Eugene Cernan, who was outside his ship on a spacewalk — just the second time an American astronaut had ever made such a trip. The vagaries of microgravity and Newton’s laws of motion meant that Cernan, on this scary day in 1966, was having a hard time controlling his movements, tugging on the cord connecting him to the Gemini space capsule.
“You’re kind of rocking the boat,” his companion and commander, Tom Stafford, radioed from inside the spaceship. Stafford had strict instructions: If Cernan put the spacecraft in danger, or was in too much danger himself, there was only one thing to be done: “Cut him loose,” the flight manager had instructed. It’s a black-and-white dictum, given for a gray situation, that Jeffrey Kluger includes to dramatic effect in his new book “Gemini: Stepping Stone to the Moon, the Untold Story.”
BOOK REVIEW — “Gemini: Stepping Stone to the Moon, the Untold Story,’’ by Jeffrey Kluger (St. Martin’s Press, 304 pages).
Cernan didn’t know Stafford’s just-in-case instructions. But his heart was hammering, Kluger continues; sweat fogged his visor, which iced over as the spacecraft orbited from the daylight to nighttime side of the Earth. Cernan, Kluger writes, “rubbed his nose against the inside of the visor, and opened a tiny hole in the ice.”
It’s a heart-pounder of an anecdote with which to begin the book. And it’s a fair preview of the rest of “Gemini,” which details many other times the Gemini space program proved an existential threat to its participants. Gemini, which took place from 1964 to 1966, came after the initial Mercury initiative — America’s first small steps into space — and was meant to prepare the country for the later Apollo missions to the moon.
Given that historical position, Gemini is often seen more as a stepping stone than a milestone in its own right. Kluger disagrees — and that, in fact, is the thesis of his book. “America and the world have overlooked Gemini too long, have forgotten its achievements too easily, have wrongly assigned it to the spot of forgotten middle sibling in the Mercury-Gemini-Apollo troika,” he writes.
“Gemini” is an attempt to remedy that sandwiching. Despite this goal, Kluger spends more than a third of the book talking about the Mercury program, detailing the environment that set the space race in motion and what those early exploratory days looked like.
In short, the Soviet Union launched the first satellite in 1957 (as Kluger humorously notes, “what Kennedy called ‘the Sputnik,’ what the rest of the world just called ‘Sputnik’”); it continued besting the U.S. by every cosmic metric. An attempt to catch up ultimately led to JFK’s famous 1962 speech, declaring to the public that the U.S. would go to the moon in short order.
“America and the world have overlooked Gemini too long, have forgotten its achievements too easily, have wrongly assigned it to the spot of forgotten middle sibling in the Mercury-Gemini-Apollo troika.”
If the nascent NASA wanted to meet the president’s ambitious timeline, though, they needed to level up their space skills. “Astronauts would have to learn to maneuver a spacecraft in orbit — now; they would have to practice the skills that would allow an orbiting mother ship and a lunar lander to rendezvous and dock in space — now.”
Also: walk in space, live there for days or weeks, and navigate without terrestrial landmarks. Also now.
Those were not tasks the Mercury program, which started in 1958, was equipped for. And yet Kluger spends dozens of pages talking about Mercury’s trials, triumphs, and tribulations before he writes himself up to NASA’s decision to build the first Gemini spacecraft.
But he does eventually get there. And, in one of many insider-y tidbits, he notes that while the rest of the world pronounced the new program’s name as the more commonly used “GEM-in-eye,” those within NASA usually said it “GEM-in-ee,” which was the agency’s official pronunciation.
After finally reaching the time period in the title, Kluger’s account treks largely chronologically through the 12 missions that made up the Gemini program. Timeline asides are reserved for biographies of astronauts and ground personnel, colorful and personal tales whose writing is much more evocative than the paragraphs detailing technical difficulties with, for instance, the astronaut ejection system.
Similarly, in describing the actualities of spaceflight, Kluger’s writing verges on poetic. In talking about the boundary between this planet and space, for instance, he describes Earth’s horizon and atmosphere as “an onion-skin band of light and life set against the blackness of space.”
For those who know the basics of the early space program, Kluger includes details that boost those days from black and white to technicolor — exposing astronauts for the humans they were. On the first crewed Gemini flight, for instance, astronaut John Young smuggled a corned-beef sandwich aboard — and then found out why he wasn’t supposed to, when crumbs began floating through the capsule.
The Gemini astronauts also come alive in the book through their jokes. When the Gemini 6 and 7 spacecraft rendezvoused in space in December 1965, Kluger describes how two sets of human faces at their windows, grinning at each other, approached each other in the vacuum and darkness of space. The moment feels profound. At least until the Gemini 6 crew posted a sign in the window that said “BEAT ARMY.”
These moments make the astronauts more human than their bios, as do the moments when Kluger writes about ways they disobeyed mission control — taking off a spacesuit for comfort, for instance, when NASA wanted them to be clad in the pressurized suits in case of emergency.
For those who know the basics of the early space program, Kluger includes details that boost those days from black and white to technicolor.
Such personal and defiant stories are where “Gemini” shines, especially in contrast to the way NASA public information — bland and sunny — has traditionally worked. As Kluger describes, NASA liked to try to shape the spaceflight narrative, as when the flight director Christopher Kraft lectured Time reporters about their work. “The magazine staffers listened respectfully as Kraft provided them a tutorial on the benefits that would accrue from many of the technical innovations the space agency was exploring,” Kluger writes.
“Gemini” also illustrates how carefully the astronauts spoke in public, to protect their images, as well as that of NASA. For instance, upon being chosen as the initial Gemini astronauts, Gus Grissom — one of the most well-known fliers, who later died in a ground test of the Apollo 1 module — said simply: “I am very happy to be assigned to the first flight. It is a real honor to be chosen to fly the very first one,” Kluger writes.
In the background of NASA’s technical and public information efforts is the Cold War — the idea that the U.S. needed to beat the Soviets in space as well as on Earth. In that and in its technical nature, Gemini was really a defense project, even if it was portrayed as a nonmilitary one.
The astronauts were risking their lives to gain political power, in addition to scientific and technical prowess — something Kluger never loses sight of.
Cernan, the rogue mission nine spacewalker, risked his life and made it out OK — an outcome Kluger saves for later in the book. After that, his writing speeds faster through some of the later missions, ending with NASA clearing the launchpad after Gemini 12 to make way for Apollo, whose flights began in 1966 and culminated in six lunar landings starting in 1969. He spends the epilogue on this program, sandwiching Gemini as he himself complained history has done.
But that epilogue would never have existed if Gemini didn’t come first. “It was Gemini that taught the US to live in space, to work in space, to walk in space, to thrive in space,” Kluger concludes. “Without Gemini, men would never have walked on the moon.”
And without “Gemini,” readers would know less about what those men’s small steps and giant leaps looked like.