GEMINI: Stepping Stone to the Moon—The Untold Story, the Moon landing's precursor

GEMINI: Stepping Stone to the Moon—The Untold Story
JEFFREY KLUGER
St. Martin's Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$16.99 ebook, available now

Time's The 100 Must-Read Books of 2025 selection

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: From the bestselling author of Apollo 13 comes the thrilling untold story of the pioneering Gemini program that was instrumental in getting Americans on the moon.

Without Gemini, there would be no Apollo.

After we first launched Americans into space but before we touched down on the moon’s surface, there was the Gemini program. It was no easy jump from manned missions in low-Earth orbit to a successful moon landing, and the ten-flight, twenty-month celestial story of the Gemini program is an extraordinary one. There was unavoidable darkness in the program—the deaths and near-deaths that defined it, and the blood feud with the Soviet Union that animated it.

But there were undeniable and previously inconceivable successes. With a war raging in Vietnam and lawmakers calling for cuts to NASA’s budget, the success of the Gemini program—or the space program in general—was never guaranteed. Yet against all odds, the remarkable scientists and astronauts behind the project persevered, and their efforts paid off. Later, with the knowledge gained from the Gemini flights, NASA would launch the legendary Apollo program.

Told with Jeffrey Kluger’s signature cinematic storytelling and in-depth research and interviews, Gemini is an edge-of-your-seat narrative chronicling the history of the least appreciated—and most groundbreaking—space program in American history. Finally, Gemini’s story will be told, and finally, we’ll learn the truth of how we landed on the moon.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: First, read this:

America would ultimately celebrate Mercury and Apollo—its first venture into space and its first venture to another world—louder and longer and with more passion than it would celebrate Gemini, the middle sibling of the manned space program. But it was Gemini that taught the US to live in space, to work in space, to walk in space, to thrive in space. Without Gemini, men would never have walked on the moon. The green shoots of space habitation poked up in the soil that was the Gemini program. Sixteen men flew those ten missions—and those same sixteen men have never been fully celebrated for the greatness they exhibited. Let history right that wrong at last.

I was alive, and eagerly obsessed, for the whole space race. I honestly forgot Gemini existed until I was reminded by this book. I'd say the author got his thesis exactly right...we needed the knowledge gained by the Gemini program to land on the moon, but once that happened, we rather forgot the Gemini program that taught us the lessons.

So I read this fascinating, detailed recapitulation of all the many milestones the Gemini and its personnel achieved, the engineers as well as the astronauts, the designers and testers and troubleshooters...all making important contributions to the pursuit of real knowledge. I was as exciting to me as it was when I watched Uncle Walter (Cronkite) carefully elucidating the sheer miraculous science underpinning these incredible achievements.

As an old man I'm more aware of the reasons the space race took place. I'm still astounded that the Congress appropriated that much money to accomplish these scientific goals. I'm still sad that the education budget was ever-expanding then because we wanted our country to have the knowledge base to solve these sorts of problems to achieve the goal of solving them, no matter it was for a political game of one-upsmanship. We now have a system that's not interested in this kind of goal anymore. "AI" is a cash grab and a thought-control mechanism, not a pursuit of knowledge that resulted in huge advances in chemistry and engineering and electronics that ended up benefiting the general public.

Gemini's technical achievements were lovely to recall because the public was very invested in their success. I remember the techno-optimism of the era with wistful amusement. I'd love to see something get the hoi polloi reinvested in expanding human knowledge for the simple reason that it is a worthy goal. Alas....

I deeply enjoyed the period headlines, reimmersing me into the era's emotional valence; I was delighted that there were notes and a bibliography to allow me to follow the author's thought processes; I appreciated the clarity of the technical talk, the way the jargon was explained (though one is expected to recall the details, they aren't continually restated) in context.

The audience for the story is me: someone who wants technical explanations with context, not a social history with some jargon sprinkled in. Put in the effort and the story's rewarding. The telling in non-fiction terms might not work for you, so I recommend reading a Kindle sample to see if you resonate positively with Author Kluger's writing.

My fellow elderly kids of the 1960s might really love this as a Yule gift. I know I'd've been thrilled by it had I received it as a gift!