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

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


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.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

In late 1966 the United States space program had surged into the lead in the race for the moon. In great part this success was attributable to the astonishing reliability of the two-man Gemini spacecraft. Originally conceived in early 1961 as an advanced follow-up to the Mercury program, Gemini proved to be a program unto itself. New technologies were devised and the brilliant modular design of Jim Chamberlin allowed Gemini the flexibility to perform almost everything that Apollo was designed for, with the exception of the ability of landing on the moon. The last Gemini flight would be flown by veteran Commander James Lovell and a brilliant rookie called Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin. Lovell's experience gained on Gemini 6 would prove the perfect foundation on which the newcomer Aldrin would be able to build a near-perfect science mission. The task of space-walking had proven arduous and dangerous on previous Gemini flights but after months of rigorous training underwater Aldrin was ready to prove that men could actually work comfortably in space. It was a critical exercise which would determine whether a moonwalking astronaut could survive the experience.