Customer Reviews

Gemini Steps to the Moon

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Gemini was an incredibly important and successful program, but unfortunately is forever cast into the shadows by the even greater achievements of Apollo. There have been several other publications written on the subject of Gemini, but most are official NASA histories that are extremely difficult (and expensive) to obtain. In this book David Shayler documents all aspects of Project Gemini from inception to conclusion. He details not only the technical aspects of the Gemini spacecraft (and spacecraft subcomponents) but discusses the development, testing, and capabilities of the Titan, Atlas, and Agena vehicles which were so crucial in obtaining program goals. Each mission is discussed in detail, and there are many illustrations (including some I have never seen anywhere else), tables, and graphs providing most any information desired.

The book is lengthy, but is never boring, and I reveled in the thorough treatment given to this crucial program, a program that truly was a giant step to the moon. My only critiques of the book are fairly miniscule. There are numerous typographical errors in the text, most of which are quite obvious, so I am rather surprised they slipped through proofreading. There are also a couple of insignificant errors in the crew biographies (notably regarding Armstrong's post-NASA teaching career) that don't dramatically detract from the book as a whole, but would be good to correct in future editions.

I highly recommend this book, and salute David Shayler for writing such an outstanding book on such a critical program.

I echo the previous reviewers' sentiments about the wealth of information about the Gemini program in Shayer's book. There are diagrams and illustrations in here that are hard to find anywhere else.

What's really frustrating to me, and which I think seriously jeopardizes this book as "the" reference on Gemini, is the number of typos and glaring factual errors. It's one thing to have extraneous punctuation marks, but many pages contain at least one major factual error. This may be due to poor editing, but nonetheless, the person reading about Gemini for the first time is going to be exposed to some blatantly wrong material.

As an example, the first sentence of page 254 says, "The recovery of Gemini 8 would be achieved at a contingency site in the Atlantic, just ten hours after launch." [Error: Gemini 8 landed in the Pacific Ocean, not the Atlantic.] There are many, many other places where units of measure are left off, or reference is made to an incorrect mission.

The other shortcoming of this book is the poor reproduction of black and white photographs. They look like someone printed them out on a home laser printer and then photocopied them.

I do think there's a lot to commend this book for the advanced reader, one who is not reading for accurate historical narrative but rather for technical data, and one who has the savvy to fill in the missing data or recognize glaring technical errors.

I have always been interested in the Gemini program, yet little information seemed to exist about it. This book is incredibly comprehensive. It does not read like a novel like Andrew Chaikins, Man on the Moon. It is divided into indepth sections on the booster, the capsule, EVA, recovery, etc. Don't get me wrong, it captures the drama in each mission well but it is not always approached in a sequential manner regarding missions. It reminds me of the Apogee book series on each mission but this has all Gemini related topics rolled into one book.

If you like to read about the exact reasoning behind scrubbed launches, every success and failure related to hardware like the Ageena docing module or boosters, the issues faced on each EVA or which suit was used on which mission, how they differed and why then this is your book.

If you want to read about Gemini, this is by far THE book to read!. EXTREME Detail on everything Gemini, and tons and tons of fascinating photos. Highly recommended!

Despite it obvious importance , Project Gemini is often overlooked if not completely ignored, and that is rather sad since it constituted the stepping stones for the incredible journey to the moon, that is that almost all the practical aspects required for a succesful mission such as rendevouz,eva,etc. were introduced, developed and tested during the Gemini project. this book is a must read for all us space fans outhere , its full of facts , good background information,and gives a total vison of the project since it's conception to it's succesful completion.