[X] My Assistant

[ilbasso]

I have just been watching an interesting video of a gathering of astronauts. On May 8, 1997, Wally Schirra, Jim Lovell, Alan Shepard, Gene Cernan, and Neil Armstrong gathered to make an historic public appearance at the National Museum of Naval Aviation, emceed by Roy Neal.

In reflecting back on his near-disasterous EVA on Gemini IX, Cernan had this interesting comment on what might have been:

Cernan: "Tom Stafford told me that had the Gemini IX accident not occurred, and had the Russian program accelerated to the point that they might orbit the Moon, it was possible that Gemini XII could have jumped on top of an Agena with a little extra boost, and they would have shot us around the Moon back in 1966. Now, I’m sort of glad things happened the way they did in retrospect, but that really would have been an eye-opener at the time. I’m not sure we could have pulled that one off."

Roy Neal: "Alan [Shepard], you were very instrumental in running the Astronaut office at that time. Can you confirm or deny the report that Cernan has just given us about Gemini XII?"

Shepard: (laughs) "Actually, I would have no comment on that." (laughs) "If you think it’s hard to say ‘no comment,’ it is difficult!"

I find this hard to believe! Would the Gemini heatshield have stood up to a 25,000 mph re-entry?

[dvandorn]

There were several lunar Gemini proposals, but likely none of them would have been Gemini XII. The one that was talked about most, I believe, was using a Centaur as a TLI booster (fit a docking collar on it from the Agena TDA assembly and put in a manual control system) for a lunar flyby. The Titan double transstage concept was for a lunar-orbit flight, IIRC.

If we had decided to put a Gemini out around the Moon, it likely would have been Geminis XIII and XIV. And it's likely it would have been circumlunar only, not lunar orbital.

What eventually happened was MSC got really jittery about sending a Gemini so far away from home. While the Gemini had matured by the end of the program, every spacecraft had its share of little glitches, and overall it was a somewhat more fragile spacecraft than Apollo. And, of course, it wasn't designed for a lunar re-entry (though a beefed-up heatshield probably would have handled it fine). They just decided that they already had a spacecraft in the works that was *designed* to go to the Moon, and that it made more sense to get Apollo ready to fly than to divert resources away from Apollo to toss a Gemini (that was *not* designed for such a trip) out there...

-the other Doug