I heard somebody whisper please adore me

[austin_dern]

Oh, this is exciting. According to Henry Spencer of sci.space.history the latest Apogee ``NASA Mission Reports'' book -- reprinting press kits, postflight interviews, and miscellaneous oddities about Gemini 12 -- includes a fifty-page proposal, written in 1965, detailing how to send a Gemini capsule around the Moon by 1967. This was always a slightly mad plan, though it was interesting enough that Pete Conrad pushed very hard for it. His Gemini 11 mission used its Agena satellite docking target to lift its orbit to a maximum height of about 1400 kilometers -- still the record manned orbital altitude, if you don't count Apollo 13 as reaching a very high Earth orbit -- as close to the lunar Gemini as any grownups would allow.

The 1965 proposal would launch a Titan III-C with a modified upper stage and a docking collar. The manned Gemini would launch a few minutes later (!), rendezvous and dock, and lift up to the Moon. I haven't seen the book, so don't know whether they'd be able to orbit. While Gemini was very cool in many ways, it was a cramped little spaceship, and had a lot of glitches with fuel cells and Reaction Control System thrusters that could make a lunar flight worrisome. It would probably be riskier than would be worth to try ... but boy, that would have been cool. And it would have completely upstaged Zond and Apollo 8 (and Gemini always had to stop short of upstaging Apollo).

Trivia: In Fiscal Year 1958, its last full year before becoming NASA, the National Advisory Council on Aeronautics had under eight thousand employees, and a budget of US$117 million. Source: Managing NASA in the Apollo Era, Arnold S. Levine. NASA SP-4102.

Currently Reading: Profiles of the Future (1984), Arthur C Clarke.

Comments

[xolo.livejournal.com]

You've touched upon one of my all-time favourite grinding axes here, you know. Had they gone with the in-orbit redezvous scheme, and developed the one man open platform lander, Gemini could have easily put a man on the moon by the summer of 1967. More than that, had the Gemini Blue/MOL system been developed as initially envisioned, by 1970 we'd have had a permanent, cheaply sustainable manned orbital station, the core of an orbiting city that could have been added to one piece at a time. With a little more work, the Rogallo glide recovery system could have been implemented, turning re-entry from a huge production involving a an aircraft carrier into a routine skid landing on a runway. It would be nothing special to launch and land several Geminis a day at that point. There's a real possibility that the Soviets would have gone broke a decade earlier trying to build a space force that could credibly have opposed us for control of earth orbit. We'd have avoided Afghanistan, and all the misfortune that has followed from that policy.

Like you said, though, nothing could really be allowed to upstage Apollo at that point.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

As outside readers can see, the Gemini capsule is a powerful and addictive drug. The 1968 Robert Altman movie Countdown shows a version of a Gemini lander, though I haven't seen the whole thing.

Gemini derivative plans, mind, lasted a very long while -- in fact, a good stretch of Space Shuttle planning hinged on the question of whether a Shuttle was practical, or whether it'd be better to build a nine-man version of Gemini and launch that on Titan III-M rockets.

[xolo.livejournal.com]

IIRC, when replacements for the shuttle were being discussed last year, the design that the majority of the Astronaut Corps favoured was pretty much an updated version of the 'Big Gemini' idea. Nearly half a century later, Gemini remains probably the best basic design ever for an orbital spaceship. It's true that the RCS thrusters and the fuel cells had issues, but those were problems generic to thrusters and fuel cells, and nothing special to Gemini. Those two technologies give grief to this day.

The true elegance of Gemini is the modularity of the design. You've got the little life support/re-entry capsule, with the huge, sturdy docking adapter on the front, and the big adapter cone on the back. Because most of the on-orbit support equipment is kept in the cone, it's very easy to build mission-specific configurations. Because it /is/ a cone, it's easy to fit the Gemini onto an oversized booster if one's needed. Because the cone is open on both ends, and largely empty space, it's remarkably easy to work in up until the point where it's mated to the capsule and rocket. You could keep a set of cones in commonly-used configurations stored and ready to go, so missions can be mounted on short notice. I won't even begin harping on the superiority of the on-pad launch erector system to the vertical assembly/crawler system. Apollo and the Shuttle have this certain bizarre magnificence just by the scale of the kludges that were invented to make them work*, but they're not practical designs.

I don't think I've ever seen 'Countdown' - does it deal with a Gemini moon mission?. I've seen concept pictures of an actual landing stage that attaches to a capsule, but the lander I was speaking of was just a little open platform that one astronaut stands on. It's got gyros, and a rocket motor on the bottom. It's essentially little more than a flying belt that you stand on instead of wear. It was a maniacal design, but then again, sending people to the moon with 1960s technology was a maniacal undertaking to begin with. We're far too cautious to do such things today.



* and the volcanic scale of the fire and noise, of course. Watching a Saturn V still pleases me deeply. I regret that I never got to see six of them strapped together lifting an Orion off the ground, as was once proposed.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

It's really hard to explain the joy Gemini brings -- and I say this as a Gemini fanboy. It helps, certainly, that it looks like a cool fighter jet, rather than the strap-on components Mercury is or the cozy little gumdrop of an Apollo capsule. Shuttle, marvelous as it is in so many ways, doesn't look like an exciting plane; it looks like a friendly, cuddly creature. It's even got a nice face and nose.

Certainly part of Gemini's all-around niftiness is that it was a second-generation design, taking the big list of ``things we did wrong'' from Mercury and fixing most of them. Had Apollo gotten its design start after Gemini, for example, Gemini innovations like the modularity of components and the instrumentation module at the base would certainly have been adopted. (That gimbal lock problem, for example, so much used for good dramatic effect in Apollo 13 was impossible on the Gemini design. Apollo wasn't taking all the lessons it should have learned.)

I disagree about the kludginess of the crawler and Vehicle Assembly Building; it's perfectly convenient to have a nice, stable indoor spot to build and work on your rockets, as many as you have room for, and wheel them out to the pad just before launch. Apollo only approached this ideal in its later cash-crunch days of Skylab and Apollo-Soyuz, but it was workable.

Countdown -- I've only seen in parts -- is based on ... I forget what makes Apollo fall apart, but there's still the drive to get a Man on the Moon Fast, so there's a Gemini lunar landing with a single pilot, who lands on a Gemini capsule with LM descent stage, and has to get out and walk to the rendezvous site for pickup. Unfortunately the movie has almost no special effects budget; from what I gather there isn't a single scene from outside the ship while in flight. I don't believe there's even a shot showing how the Gemini docks to the LM base. That can make you feel like You Are There, certainly, but it is a bit of a disappointment for a movie.