From Voskhod to Gemini

a spacecraft that was named the Vostok one. And I also talked about how US astronaut Alan Shepherd flew a suborbital mission in the Freedom seven Mercury space capsule. But I had not quite reached the point where a U. S astronaut completed an orbit of the Earth or what came next. So in today's episode, we're gonna look more at those missions and the spacecraft that followed those early examples.

So both the Vostok and the Mercury spacecraft went on six missions, not not the same spacecraft, but those models, uh, they both went on six different missions from nineteen sixty one to nineteen sixty three. So they were closely in competition with one another. The Soviet missions included Valentina Tereshkova. She was the first woman in space. The US missions had two suborbital missions, the first in the Freedom seven that I mentioned earlier with Alan Shepard. The second was

in a spacecraft named the Liberty Bell seven. That one was piloted by Virgil Ivan Gus Grissom. Gus would also play a very important role in the development of the Gemini spacecraft, which I'll talk about later in this episode. And starting with the third Mercury mission, which was in the Friendship seven and was piloted by John Glenn, the US began to send astronauts into orbits, so John Glenn was the first US astronaut to go into orbit. I'll cover that one more in just a second, because that

was a big deal for the US. The Mercury missions had two designations. These suborbital flights were classified under the name Mercury Redstone. The four orbital missions were called Mercury Atlas missions. So along with Shephard, Grissom, and Glenn, you had the astronauts Leroy Gordon, Gordy Cooper Jr. Walter Marty, Wally Skira Jr. Malcolm Scott Carpenter who didn't get a fun nickname, I guess, and Donald Kent Deek Slayton, the only one of the seven who did not pilot a

Mercury mission. Because I remember there were six Mercury missions, they were one man capsules, seven astronauts. Someone gets left out. The one left out was Donald Kent Deek Slayton. He was grounded after medical exams found he had an irregularity with his heartbeat, and just to be on the safe side, they decided not to send him up into space, although everyone kept saying he'd probably be okay, but we don't

want to take the chance. Slayton, however, would eventually regain his flight status in the nineteen seventies and would ultimately get to travel to space as part of an Apollo Soyu's mission, which I'll talk about in the next episode. That was a collaborative effort between the United States and the Soviet space programs. So he did finally get to go up into space, but it was a decade later

than what he had planned. John Glenn's historic flight on February twenty, nineteen sixty two, some orbit the Earth three times the mission took nearly five hours from launch to touchdown, and Cooper's mission on May fifteenth, nineteen sixty three, on the Faith seven took nearly a day and a half. This was the final Mercury mission. So why did it take so long, Well, it's because Cooper orbited the Earth

twenty two times. To prepare for these orbital missions, astronauts would train for two years and one month out from the mission launch date. Two astronauts would get the nod as being the picks for that mission. You would have an astronaut and you would have an alternate. That way, if the primary pick had an issue on launch day, like a medical condition that could threaten the safety of the astronaut or the mission, there was already an alternate.

So let's say it's launched day. Everyone wakes up. Turns out your primary pick for your mission has come down with a terrible case of food poisoning. Well, you can't send that person up in a spacecraft. You have to go with your alternate. Three days before launch, the astronauts who had been picked for that mission would be switched to a special diet that would help reduce the possibility that said astronaut would need to go poop during the mission.

I said that in a way to honor my former co host Chris Palette, who I think would have said it the same way. Chris, if you're listening, let me know. The astronauts would get suited up and put on a mask to breathe pure oxygen to prep for the conditions of being inside the capsule a few hours before they actually would get in. Two hours before launch they would go and get into them are cury capsule, so they still have two hours to go. And the last episode

I mentioned the dimensions of this capsule. It was big enough for a single astronaut seated in kind of a reclined position, so they're essentially laying on their backs in a seated position, staring up at the sky. Outside the capsule, mechanics would bolt on the hatch to seal the astronaut inside. Ground control would go forward with the countdown, checking all the launch systems and the weather conditions to make sure

everything was good to go. Delays would just mean that the astronaut would be laying down there for a really long time. There's a great story about Alan Shepherd and a delay and his roop need to make use of the facilities, and there are no facilities aboard the Mercury, at least not that first one. I'll leave it at that. You can read up on it if you really want to know more. Anyway, four seconds before liftoff, the rocket

engines would come to life and they would ignite. Clamps would hold the launch vehicle down on the pad, essentially holding the rocket in place until enough thrust had been built up for liftoff. At that point, the clamps would release and the rocket would lift off the launch pad, and a couple of minutes after launch to booster, rocket engines would turn off and jettison off the vehicle. A central thruster would continue to fire and give enough thrust to do sort of the final push to get up

into orbit. That would continue until they reached the proper orbital altitude, and then they would the capsule could re orient itself into a position that was horizontal with respect to the Earth, then the engine would shut off. At that point, the spacecraft would jettison the launch engines and continue its orbit until it was time to reorient again and fire the retro rockets, which would slow down the spacecraft enough for it to re enter the Earth's atmosphere.

That repositioning for re entry was really the only maneuvering the capsule could do in space, and it took just a bit less than an hour and a half to make a full orbit of the Earth, around eighty eight minutes or so to do one full orbit. I talked about the reentry process in the last episode, so I'm not going to go over it again here, because it

was the same for each of the Mercury missions. To slow down enough so that the parachutes would deploy once you hit certain altitudes, and then you would land in the water and wait to get picked up. Now, it's basically it. The first of the six man Mercury flights happened on May five, nineteen sixty one. The final one happened on May fifteenth, nineteen sixty three. During that time,

what was happening over at the Soviet Union. Well, in the last episode, I talked about the Vostok one mission with Uri, which was again that first space mission to put a human into orbit, that happened in April nineteen sixty one, a month before the first manned Mercury mission. Then the Americans held their first suborbital manned flight, which

was partially piloted by the astronaut inside the spacecraft. So that was a little bit of a one up on the Soviets in that respect, because Uri didn't control the space craft of the Vostok one that was completely under automatic control. On August six, nineteen sixty one, a few months later, the Vostok two launched into space with the then twenty five year old cosmonaut Garman Titov. He spent

more than a day orbiting the Earth. He was out in space orbiting the Earth for more than twenty four hours. That was something that the Americans would not be able to match. For nearly two years, his spacecraft orbited the Earth seventeen times during the amount of time he was out in space. And like Uri, Titov was inside a Vostok three k A spacecraft. It was called the Vostok two, but its classification was Vostok three k A. The crew compartment was essentially a sphere. It is the same as

as Uri Gagarin's. This connected to an equipment module that was more conical in shape. I mentioned that in the previous episode two that in turn connected to the rocket engines. The length of the mission was a matter of hot scientific debate before the launch of the law stuck to how long should this mission be. The Russians had experimented with dogs aboard a spacecraft that had made six orbits of the Earth, and during those experiments the dogs had

experienced convulsions, so those Soviets weren't sure. Maybe if you stayed in space for more than just a few orbits you might start having severe health issues. So the dogs had returned to Earth alive, but it left the scientists worried that a human might encounter similar problems after extended periods of weightlessness. There was also a concern about where the spacecraft was going to land, because each time it orbited the Earth, it would actually shift the landing position

for the the spacecraft. It would shift a little bit to the west. So if you orbited a few times, you would still be in Russia Russia is a really big country, but a few more than that and suddenly you're in Europe, and then you'd be out over the ocean, etcetera. And so you have to keep orbiting the Earth until you had done essentially a twenty four hour stint in

space before you were over Russia again. So the choices seemed to be either go up for a very short amount of time, which was similar to what they had already done, or grow up for a longer time, not knowing what the effects were going to be, but you would be able to land the spacecraft back in Russia. So ultimately they decided to go with the longer mission. Titov was given manual control of his spacecraft during the mission, so while he was in orbit he was able to

take control of this Vostok to spacecraft. Ground controls still maintained control of the spacecraft for most of its operation. The mission did have a couple of issues. One of the was the first known instance of space sickness. This is a kind of a disoriented nausea that can set upon an astronaut or a cosmonaut. Titov became nauseated shortly after the first few orbits had passed. He fell asleep after his spacecraft had made seven orbits. This was planned.

He was actually going to bed, and he slept for more than eight hours, but when he woke up he reported that he still wasn't feeling great. It was only after twelve orbits that the nausea passed. Also, like the Vostok one, the Vostok to experienced problems upon re entry. If you listen to my last episode, you heard about that.

In fact, it was exactly the same issue. The equipment module, that conical section that's connected to the sphere that's the re entry module, did not detach properly at the beginning of re entry. It's supposed to jettison off, but it failed to do that completely. It was still kind of tethered to the spherical re entry module. That threw off the Vostech two's orientation. You suddenly had this loose weight that was connected to your re entry module, and it

made it spin and gyrate and shake like crazy. Eventually, the heat and the various gyrations of this spacecraft made that tether break, and then the re entry module was all by itself and it continued down as it had been intended, and it uh there were no other issues and uh and Titov was able to eject at the seven kilometer mark and float down safely on his parachute. Now I've got more to say about the Vostok commissions, but before I get into that, let's take a quick

break to thank our sponsor. A year After the Vostok two mission, the Soviet Union held a pair of launches. On August eleven, n andre Nikkarayev launched into space on the Vostok three, and he would end up spending almost four full days in orbit, making sixty four orbits around

the Earth. This was still a year before Gordie Cooper would break the amer I Can record by orbiting the Earth twenty two times in the Faith seven Mercury Capsule, So the Soviet Union was really setting records in endurance in orbit, and records that wouldn't be broke until NASA would have their Gemini project later on the day after the Vostok three launched, the Soviet Union launched the Vostok four.

This one carried Pavel Popovich on board. That made the Soviet Union the first country in the world to have two manned spacecraft in orbit at the same time. The two ships were actually able to establish ship to ship radio communication when they got close enough to each other, and by close enough, I mean they were still kilometers apart, like six and a half kilometers apart when they established radio communications, so they weren't like they were right next

to each other. The USSR would then repeat that feat with the Vostok five and six capsules. Remember, Vostok six was also the one that had Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman in space aboarded. Those spacecraft launched in June nineteen sixty three. The Vostok five made eighty two orbits. The Vostok six, with Valentina aboard, made forty eight orbits. Like the Vostok one and two spacecraft, the Vostok five experienced those same problems with that separation from the equipment module

upon re entry. And at this point it's amazing to me that none of these Soviet missions resulted in a catastrophic failure upon re entry. Now, there are conspiracy theories that alleged the Soviet Union space program resulted in numerous unreported cosmonaut fatalities. I should add that most of those conspiracy theories don't rely on very convincing evidence. It's a lot of circumstantial stuff and a lot of just wild speculation.

Now that does not mean that the theories are wrong necessarily, but I wouldn't put stock into them without more actual evidence in proof of the matter. Did it happen, maybe,

but I haven't seen the evidence to convince me. Yet, both the Archy and Vostok programs had those six manned missions and both saw the final missions launch in nineteen sixty three, and both the USA and the USSR would go on to different designs for their next spacecraft, although they were both very similar to the previous generation of spacecraft. So for the Soviets, that was the Voshkod project, And

I have no idea if I'm saying that correctly. I could be completely butchering it, but I'm going with it. So the vosh Cood space vehicles started off essentially as Vostok spacecraft, but they had a couple of different designs to it. One, they had an additional solid fuel retro rocket mounted on the re entry module. Remember the first Vostok spacecraft had one retro rocket, and if it failed then the cosmonauta board would just have to wait for ten days for the orbit to decay enough for the

spacecraft to re enter the Earth's atmosphere. However, the Vashkad could not take this luxury, if you can call it that, because it was going to be placed in a higher orbit, so it would take much longer for its orbit to decay and it would put the cosmonauts life in danger, so just in case one of the retro rockets were the main retro rocket, if it were to fail, there

was a backup. The Vashkad also had a projection on it that was a place it was a ring where inside the ring there was an inflatable airlock system inside of it, which would be used on the second vash Cod mission. It wasn't used in the first one, but it would be used in the second one, and that gave the vosh God spacecraft a little bit of a knobby look to it compared to the Vostok one. But the Vashkad also lacked an important feature that the Vostok had,

which was a launch escape system. The Vostok had a limited escape system if an emergency happened during launch, assuming it wasn't too early in the launch or too late in the launch, you could actually use the escape system to pull the cosmonaut away to safety. The vash Cod did not have this, so if there had been a failure during launch, there would be no escape for the cosmonauts, which is pretty terrifying. It was designed to land with the crew still inside the spacecraft, which again set it

apart from the Vostok. With Vostok, once you hit seven kilometers upon descent, you would eject out of the spacecraft and you would parachute by yourself down to the ground. The vash God was meant to parachute with the cosmonauts still inside the capsule. And that that bit about the crew being inside the capsule and saying like everyone would still be inside, that's a clue to the other big advancement.

The vash God could carry more than one cosmonaut. Now it was meant to carry two, but political pressure from the Soviet government that really was determined to show up the United States demanded that the first manned vosh Good mission would actually have three crew members, and that was more or less a political requirement, not a technologic goal

requirement a scientific one. It was politically motivated, and the engineers had to figure out how to make this work in a spacecraft that was really meant to carry just two people in space suits. So that meant that the three people inside the Vashkod could not wear space suits. They had to wear normal jumpsuits but not space suits, which was again terrifying because if anything went wrong, there was no pressurized space suit that could save their lives.

They would just die in that capsule. And America was already at work of the Gemini project. So this had created a real um motivation for Russia to move forward and get multiple cosmonauts aboard one space vehicle. It would set another world's first, to be the world's first spacecraft to carry more than one person. That three person crew came with some other hefty drawbacks. Uh, it wasn't just

the space suits. I mean, there was hardly any room for anyone to move, and there was a real concern that the the close proximity and the limited maneuverability was going to require them to cut the mission short. The vash Cod one launched on October twelve, nineteen sixty four, and they completed sixteen orbits around the Earth and returned

a little more than twenty four hours after launch. The Vashkod also had a breaking rocket, as in hit the brakes that would help slow down the spacecraft's descent and help reduce the impact of landing on solid ground. Because the vosh Cod, unlike the Mercury or the Gemini where the Apollo as it were, wasn't designed to land in the water. It was designed to land on firm ground

for the cosmonauts aboard the vosh God. The world changed significantly during their mission because when they went up into space, the Soviet premiere was Nikita Khrushchev. When they landed a day later, Krishtchev had been removed from power and replaced by Alexey caused Gin and Leonid Brezhnev, which is a heck of a twenty four hours when the leadership of your country has changed in essentially a coup. Since you

went up into space, it came back down. That's a big deal, especially when you consider it's the government that's funding everything. The vash good To mission would launch in March nineteen sixty five. Now, this was a two man mission with both cosmonauts wearing space suits. This was supposed to be more along the lines of what the engineers

had intended from the beginning. This was also a necessity they had to wear space suits because this was the first space flight to have a space walk, meaning one of the two cosmonauts was going to have to leave the spacecraft and go out into outer space, so both of them had to have space suits. Alexei Leonov, the pilot of the craft conducted a twelve minute spacewalk during this mission, and the whole mission lasted a little more than twenty four hours and the craft made seventeen orbits

of the Earth. The Vashkod deployed in inflatable exterior airlock in order to allow for this mission that that airlock, like I said, was on sort of a ring on the outer side of the spherical reentry module, and after use, after Leonov had come back into the capsule, they would jettison the airlock into space, so it was not a permanent part of the spacecraft itself. The airlock required seven

minutes to inflate. It had forty channels into which air would flow, and those channels were all grouped into three big clusters and that would hold the shape of the airlock. The airlock kept the spacecraft pressurized while it was first deployed, so Leonov would inflate this airlock, open up the hatch, climb into the airlock, and his commander, Pavo Beliyev would seal the hatch behind Leonov, and then the airlock would

be depressurized. That would allow Leonov to exit the spacecraft into space, and according to Leonov, he was given a special a special thing just in case there were any problems of him getting back into the spacecraft. Because there was no guarantee he was going to be able to get back in once he went out. They tried very hard to design a system so that Leonov would be able to return to the spacecraft, but no one was

really sure how it was going to turn out. So just in case, he had a suicide capsule that he could bite into in case he would be unable to go back into the spacecraft, so that he could end his life on his own terms, which is pretty heavy stuff even in a waitless environment. Leonov actually did have some problems getting back into the spacecraft. It fortunately did not necessitate suicide, but he was having some issues. He

was getting finding difficulty moving through the airlock. His space suited sort of inflated and it made squeezing through the airlock very difficult. So in order to move through the airlock, he was forced to release some air m his suit to release pressure from his suit out into space and give him enough flexibility to move through the airlock and get back inside the spacecraft. Once he was in, it took him and his crewmate more time to seal the spacecraft.

They were having issues making sure that the seal was actually proper and then justicing the the airlock, and then they found it difficult to maneuver inside the spacecraft but inside their space suits, so they were you know, they had gotten up out of their seats in order to do this, and it was hard for them to get back into position for re entry. So all of this delayed the re entry process by a bit, and so

things did not go exactly as planned. On top of all that, the vox Shod two had the same re entry problem that the Volstock one, two and five spacecrafts dead. In other words, the re entry module and the equipment module did not have a clean separation. Upon re entry, they were stuck together, which meant that again the red Tree module started to spin like crazy until finally the

equipment module broke away. And so by the time everything was said and done, their spacecraft landed about four hundred kilometers away from where they had planned to land, so they were hundreds of miles away from where they were supposed to go. Their spacecraft touchdown in a heavily forested area that was populated by little critters, you know, like wolves and bears. Fortunately, the Soviet government had thought about this. They had supplied them with a pistol and some ammunition

just in case of bear attack. You know. They ended up having to bunker down in a freezing cold spacecraft. The heater was no longer working, although the fans were still blowing air, and they it got super cold, like it dropped below freezing in that part of Russia, and

uh they were able to survive the night. The next day, a rescue party on skis was able to reach their location, but it was too late for them to leave that location at that point, so instead the group constructed a log cabin, a simple log gavin and that's where they stayed overnight, and then the next day they were able

to ski to a rescue location. Because the forest was so thick, there was just no place for helicopters to land to pick them up, so they had to ski down to a site where helicopters could pick them up from there. After this second Vashkad program, or mission, rather, the whole program concluded. There were a lot other missions that had been planned as part of this program, but by then the Soviet Union was changing its mind. The

regime had changed in the USSR. The the scientists in charge of the space program, we're finally getting a little more leverage so that they could demand a more scientific approach and fewer missions that were just meant to show up the United States. Uh And while they were impressive, they weren't. They weren't advancing science and technology very much. So that was their objection to that. And plus over the United States, NASA was making up ground with the

Gemini project. More about that in just a second, but first let's take a quick break to thank our sponsor. So the Vashkad program was again putting the Soviets ahead of the Americans. But meanwhile work on the Gemini project was continuing with enthusiasm. The project actually began in nineteen sixty one. That was while the Mercury flights were still going on. So the Mercury flights are going and already

NASA is thinking about the next project. Actually, technically NASA was thinking two projects ahead, because between Mercury and Gemini, NASA had already determined that they were going to have the Apollo missions. So Gemini was launched as a project after Apollo. Although the flights would all happen before Apollo. The first Gemini mission wouldn't launch until March, which was the same month as Vakshad two. So the Gemini was a two person spacecraft, and the two crew members would

sit side by side in very cramped quarters. You couldn't really get up and move around very much. You were pretty much stuck in that seated position unless you were popping outside to do a quick extra vehicular activity or spacewalk. So if you're sitting down, if you're in the left seat, that would mean that you are the command pilot for that mission, and in the right seat would be the

pilot for the mission. The seats had an ejection system inside of them, because unlike the Mercury, which had a launch escape system incorporated directly into the design of the launch configuration for the spacecraft, the Gemini did not have that. The best they had was an ejection seat. Now I didn't really cover this when I talked about the Mercury, but if you were to look at a Mercury capsule on top of a rocket on a launchpad, you would notice there's this kind of tower that's on the very

top of the Mercury capsule. That tower was the escape mechanism for UH in the case of a launch failure. Essentially, it was a booster rocket attached via that tower to the top of the Mercury capsule. So if there was

a launch catastrophe, the rocket would ignite. That would separate the crew section of the Mercury spacecraft from the launch vehicle to create distance between the capsule and the rocket, and then the booster rocket would break away and the parachutes would come out and hopefully the crew would land safely. The Gemini did not have this, They just had the ejector seats. They would bring that launch escape mechanism back

for the Apollo missions. So while Mercury was all about learning more about how space would affect humans, Gemini's purpose was largely to set the foundation for the succeeding Apollo mission, which would take people to the Moon. So, as I said before, the Apollo program started before the Gemini program. But the goal of the Apollo program was getting to

the Moon and getting back to Earth safely. And NASA said, hey, you know what, we probably need an intermediary step between Mercury, where people went into orbit, and Apollo, where people are going to go to the Moon. We're gonna need to test a whole lot of different technology. We're going to have to refine processes. We're gonna have to figure out how to do specific maneuvers like putting a spacecraft into a docking mode to uh interconnect with another spacecraft, and

how to do orbital maneuvers. These are all things that the Mercury Capsule could not do. It was not equipped to do that. But they would need to perfect this before they committed in the Apollo program. So President Kennedy chartered the Apollo program in May nineteen sixty one. Gem and I would not get a formal announcement until January ninety two. The both of those programs were already in

development before those specific dates. Now that meant that Gemini missions were going to focus on things like prolonged space flights, extra vehicular activity, or spacewalks, orbital maneuvers. These were all going to be critical components of Apollo missions because landing on the Moon would mean that part of your spacecraft would detach from the command module and then land on the Moon, and so you would have a crew of

three with Apollo. Spoiler alert for next episode and two of the crew members would go down in the lander and land on the Moon. The third one would stay aboard on the command module, and then ultimately those two people would have to get back into the lander that would launch off the surface of the Moon, rendezvous with the command module and DOC. So there were a lot of things that had to be worked out in order to make that technology possible, and that's why Gemini existed.

It was to be the working ground to create all that technology. The Gemini program was marked by both triumph and tragedy. It would put the US back in the lead for the space race ultimately, but it also involved the deaths of three of the astronauts involved. In nineteen sixty four, Theodore Freeman died in a crash while bringing his T thirty eight training jet in for a landing.

The cause of the crash was actually a goose flew and collided with the cockpit as the jet was landing, and it collided with such force that it broke part of the cockpit and plexiglass flew out the cockpit into the engine intake and caused the jet to crash. And in nineteen sixty six, Elliott C. And Charles Bassett, who had been chosen to be the crew members for Gemini nine. They died in an accident on a training jet. H Elliot Sea was piloting the plane. The weather was really bad.

There was rain, there was fog, there was snow. Ultimately, an investigation concluded that pilot was at fault for the crash, and so the backup crew for Gemini nine would end up taking their place. In many ways, the Gemini spacecraft was sort of an ambig end version of the Mercury capsule. NASA had learned a lot from the Mercury project, however,

so it wasn't identical. There were some major differences. One of those was that NASA created a modular system for spacecraft components, which allowed different teams to work on the various systems in their individual modules, and so when they tested these before ever launching anything, making sure everything works

with everything else. If a system failed or proved incompatible with the capsule design, the team could take that module back out and they could make adjustments to it, fixing it, changing it, and all the other modules that had been working just fine could remain in place. They didn't have to be messed with. So since it wasn't all incorporated

directly together in one big mess. Then you could make more granular changes and you could have a lot of pair allel development going on simultaneously, which of course saved a huge amount of time and effort, and ultimately that also meant saved money. Gemini also relied heavily on solid state electronics, taking advantage of advances and electronics that had developed while the Mercury project was already going, so they were more sophisticated spacecraft, and like the Mercury, the Gemini

was meant to land in the water. Originally, NASA had wanted to incorporate gear that would allow a touchdown on land, but time constraints meant there just wasn't enough time to do that, so they decided to go with the true splash down approach. They had tried it, they knew it worked, They're gonna stick with it. The Gemini capsule also had a detachable module called the Adapter module at the base

of it. Inside that compartment were some various systems like propulsion, electrical, water, and oxygen, as well as the retro rockets, so it was separate from the cabin that the crew never sat in. Technically, the Gemini had five sections had the equipment section, a retrograde section, and both of those were inside the adapter module. It had the cabin section that's where the crew sat. It had a re entry control system, and a rendezvous and recovery section, so that's kind of working from the

base up. The equipment section was the part that would also interface with the launch vehicle. That's space talk saying, that's the part that would attach to the rocket. So the rocket for the original Gemini mission was a Titan two. They would use other rockets later on in the Gemini program. Fun fact that Titan two's original purpose was to be an intercontinental ballistic missile or ICBM, and I'll talk more about that in an upcoming episode of tech Stuff. So

let's say you're looking at this Gemini spacecraft. Are looking at it from top to bottom. The the conical section, not the rocket, but just the spacecraft part for the Gemini, the tippy tippy top, the pointy bit was the rendezvous and recovery section that had rendezvous ray it are inside of it, and also the two parachutes that would be used to help stabilize and slow down the spacecraft in

its descent. The next segment down was the re entry control system, which held fuel and oxidizer tanks and attitude control thrusters. I always like talking about attitude control with spacecraft because it sounds like a spacecraft was kind of getting out of line and then you just you turn on attitude control. It's like giving it a time out, except we're really talking about orientation, not like personality attitude.

Next down the line was the cabin section, the place where the crew sat the two crew members of each Gemini mission. Then was the retrograde and equipment sections. Retrograde on top of equipment, but this is the base of that conical section. Both in the adapter module. The retrograde had de orbit motors and thrusters, and the equipment section had more control thrusters and um the systems I had mentioned earlier, and these were all meant to allow the

Gemini to maneuver in space. And one of the really really big changes between Mercury and gem and I was that gem and I could actually move into a different orbit, So Mercury could reorient itself for re entry. It could change its orientation with respect to the Earth, but it couldn't change its orbit. Jim and I could it had the thrusters and the fuel aboard to allow for that, so you could actually move the Gemini from one orbit into another Earth orbit. There were ten manned Gemini missions.

Dieck Slayton, who was one of the original Mercury astronauts but was never allowed to fly a Mercury mission he was grounded due to irregularities detected in his heartbeat, would become the director of flight crew Operations, so was his job to pick which astronauts would serve as crew aboard the various missions. Those missions included a couple of really notable ones. They were all notable, but there are a

couple of standouts. Jim and I eight in nineteen sixty six saw Neil Armstrong UH and UH David Randall Scott deal with a real emergency. The mission saw the Jeini spacecraft dock with an unmanned target vehicle out in space. This was the first time any manned vehicle had docked with another vehicle out in space, so a first in the world. One of the ways that the United States was able to start getting a lead on the Soviet Union.

But while it was docked, one of the Gemini's thrusters malfunctioned and it sent the craft into an unplanned spin, so Armstrong and Scott had to work to undock the Gemini and Armstrong had to try and regain control of the spacecraft. They were forced to conduct an emergency landing. It was the first time any US manned space mission required an emergency landing, but they were able to do it, and obviously they both survived, and they would also both

go on to participate in Apollo missions. In fact, both of them would be UH two of the astronauts to walk on the Moon, which is kind of cool. The longest of all the Gemini missions would happen right in the middle of the program. It was the Gemini seven, which was just a few hours shy of lasting two full weeks in low Earth orbit. It made two hundred six orbits of the Earth. And again this was one of those necessities to show how long term exposure to

the rigors of space travel would affect people. If you're gonna go all the way to the Moon and back, that's a journey that takes a couple of days, So you want to make sure absolutely certain that human beings can withstand those those uh stresses that are put upon them. Now, in our next episode, I'll look more closely at the Apollo and soy U's capsules and and what made those

spacecraft special. Talk more about the design of the Apollo spacecraft and how it was able to make such an amazing accomplishment like landing a segment on the Moon, and only that, but taking off from the Moon and reconnecting with the command module. That's the part that really blows my mind, not just that we were able to get people to the Moon, but that we were able to get them back again. That's phenomenal. That will be our

next episode. After that, we're gonna take a closer look at rockets, and after that we're gonna look at the Space Shuttle. So we've got a lot more space to come. If you guys have any suggestions for future episodes of tech Stuff, possibly not involving space at all, send me a message. The email address is tech Stuff at how stuff works dot com. You can drop me a line on Facebook or Twitter. The handle there is tech Stuff hs W. Remember we've got a merch store now over

at t public dot com slash tech stuff. That's t e public dot com slash tech stuff. If you've ever wanted a tech stuff T shirt or coffee mug. Now's your chance. Don't forget. You can also follow us on Instagram. I hope to see you there and I'll talk to you again really soon. For more on this and thousands of other topics. Is that how stuff works dot com