Gemini 12: The NASA Mission Reports: Apogee Books Space Series 40 [Paperback]

Robert Godwin (Editor), Steve Whitfield (Editor)

Book Description

Series: Apogee Books Space Series | Publication Date: January 1, 2004

Provides details of the last Gemini flight, flown by veteran Commander James Lovell and brilliant rookie Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin.

Editorial Reviews

Review

The entire NASA Mission Reports series are well worth having in your library. -- Extreme Rocketry, October, 2003

From the Publisher

The final document in this book has been added mainly for the curious. It reflects on a plan to actually use the mated Gemini-Agena to send astronauts around the moon. Although today it may seem to have been an especially audcious plan - particularly given the notoriously unreliable nature of Agena - at the time it was given serious consideration. In fact the original project Gemini chief engineer, Jim Chamberlin, had espoused such an idea back in March of 1961 before Gemini had flown its first flight, such was his confidence in the vehicle which he and his team were bringing to fruition. Chamberlin was a notably brilliant designer who had come to the fledging Space Task Group (STG) when the Avro Arrow CF-105 program had been concelled in Canada. Robert Gilruth had placed Chamberlin at the top of the engineering division at STG and in early 1961 he had been assigned the problem of coming up with an advanced Mercury spacecraft.

Chamberlin had worked extensively on Mercury and so he knew its weaknesses, so when he turned his considerable talents to improving the vehicle he knew it would require an overhaul to do it right. Between January and August of 1961 Chamberlin conceived of a new vehicle which would build on Mercury's strengths an eliminate many weaknesses. His ideas soon took the advanced Mercury program from what was to have been an upgrade to an entirely new program - which he felt could accomplish much of Apollo's goals. All through the summer of 1961 Chamberlin rewrote his ideas for a Gemini lunar mission. His ideas for a spider-like lander soon coincided quite handily with the ideas which were coming from John Houbolt at Langley. It was becoming evident that lunar orbit rendezvous was the way to get to the moon, and this fit nicely with the proposals that Chamberlin had devised. But his ideas were met with much scepticism by Abe Silverstein, director of Space Flight Programs.

Chamberlin must have never quite given up on the idea because the report at the end of this book comes from mid-1965. Some engineers must have felt that the only way to complete Kennedy's punitive time-line was to resort to the ever-reliable Gemini, but it ws not to be. The contracting engineers and NASA rallied to the call and as they say, the rest is history.

Product Details

• Paperback: 264 pages
• Publisher: Collector's Guide Publishing, Inc. (January 1, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1894959043
• ISBN-13: 978-1894959049
• Product Dimensions: 10.1 x 6.9 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,062,917 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Great as Usual, April 3, 2004

By 

John R. Keller (Houston, TX United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Gemini 12: The NASA Mission Reports: Apogee Books Space Series 40 (Paperback)

Over the past five years, Robert Godwin and Apogee Books have compiled a variety of various NASA documents, press kits, crew interviews and the like, which recount the early days of the space race and with specific emphasis on the Apollo missions. As is obvious from the title, this book does not focus on any Apollo mission, but the final Gemini mission, Gemini 12. With the launch of this mission, one of the most successful manned space flight projects came to an end. The mission focused on rendezvous and docking; however, the most important aspect of this mission was the testing and evaluation of the Extravehicular Activities (EVA). Veteran astronaut James Lovell who was making his second trip into space commanded this mission, while rookie astronaut Buzz Aldrin conducted the EVAs. By all accounts, this mission was extremely successful and proved that man could function in space outside of the spacecraft.

Like many of the other volumes in this NASA Mission Report series, the book opens with the usual NASA press releases and mission press kit. It is easy to tell that the author and his staff have spent some time searching for some very clean originals, since compared to their earlier efforts the scanned in drawings are almost perfect. In addition, to the customary background information, the press kit focuses on the scientific and operational aspects of the mission including a nice summary of all the Gemini missions. The next section contains the Gemini 12 Summary Operations Report, which presents a basic overview of the planned activities of the mission, including the EVA timelines. A small six page report summaries the Gemini program accomplishedments.

The next section, the crew debrief section, covers over half of the book, and is 140 pages long. This part contains the crew's comments and feelings about various phases of the mission. Unlike a lot of the previously published crew debriefings, this one is fairly technical and uses a lot of undefined NASA acronyms. Most of the pages in this section are devoted to the EVAs and as one would expect, Buzz Aldrin does most of the talking. There are nice sections on the rendezvous and docking as well as general spacecraft performance through out the mission. Here James Lovell is much more involved in the debriefing.

The final section of the book includes a seldom seen report about modifying the Gemini capsule and launch vehicle, so that it could be launch towards the moon and eventuully enter lunar orbit. While the report does not present a lot of technical detail, but it does show that was possible to use the Gemini capsule for lunar operations.

As usual the book also contains a CD that is loaded with a variety of interesting features. The CD contains over 400 photographic still images that appear to be in high resolution and focuses on the EVAs, Earth Observations, and rendezvous and docking. The CD contains 16mm camera footage, a NASA mission movie, and the mission Air-to Ground transcript. The CD also contains a nice interview with James Lovell.

Some general information that might be useful.

1) These reports are just scanned-in documents from previously released NASA press kits, etc., In order to preserve the spirit of the original reports, all typographical and grammatical errors have NOT been fixed.

2) Proceeds from the book goes to "The Watch" an asteroid impact research project of the Space Frontier Foundation. In other words, Apogee Books is making very little off the sale of US government produced books and documents.

3) Many people have asked why the post mission reports are not included. Since NASA has published several books with hundred of pages each (The NASA SP series), it would be difficult to included this voluminous amount of data.