What does it say that the most recent book about the American Gemini space program was written by a German?

I'm not old enough to remember the Gemini launches, but it has always been my favorite part of the history of manned (and it was, regrettably all men!) space flight. The early programs -- the Soviet Vostok and the American Mercury flights -- basically existed to prove that it was possible to live in space. The Soviet Voskhods weren't much different from the Vostoks; the later Soyuz didn't break a lot of ground either. The American Apollo program of course did, but it was all focused on Lunar visits. It was Gemini that really studied how to do things in space.

There are many examples of that, from the seemingly-mundane (fuel cells as a power source) to the flashy (rendezvous in space) to the extremely informative (spacewalks). No other manned space programs did this like Gemini. And this book provides a painless overview of all those accomplishments, describing both the program as a whole and each of the individual flights. It praises without sugar-coating -- e.g. it is honest about the problems astronauts like Gene Cernan had with spacewalks, and it doesn't hold back about the near-disasters, such as that which arose when the rockets on Gemini 8 went out of control.

There are of course some omissions and errors -- the diagrams of the spacecraft are so detailed as to be hard to read, and even so, left me with questions. I'd love to know a bit more about how some of the parts worked (why, e.g., use hypergolic fuels in some of the engines but standard fuel/LOX mixes in others. And more details about things like UDMH -- unsymmetrical dimethyl hydrazine -- would have been welcome, at least as an appendix). There are several places where (I assume) a translation from Metric units to English produced some oddities. But these are all minor.

The Gemini program was basically a dead end. America turned next to Apollo, then to the Space Shuttle; ironically, we're now developing spacecraft with more Gemini-like characteristics, but without any continuity with what was past. I think that genuinely sad. This book is a nice reminder of what we left behind. ( )

I am covering all three books by Eugen Reichl in this review since all three (Project Mercury, Project Gemini, and Project Apollo) essentially follow the same formats and have the same positives and negatives.

These books fall some place between a pure technical overview and a light kind of recap of who was on each mission. They lean toward the technical aspect primarily because these are the stories of each phase of the space exploration program leading up to the moon landing in 1969. The astronauts, while prominent, do not play the lead roles here. Each mission itself within the larger story of each "Project" are the main characters. As such each is a wonderful narrative covering the life of the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo Projects.

Yes, as has been pointed out, there are a couple of minor errors here, but I remember seeing errors in thermodynamics textbooks yet those books served very well in educating a generation of engineers, and the errors here are only important to those wanting to stand up and scream "look what I found, aren't I so smart." These books are narratives, not research or reference books for future aeronautical engineers. Hopefully these might ignite the passion of future engineers, but this won't be where they get facts or figures that will stay with them forever. So don't sweat the little, um, you know.

For those of us who remember these missions and grew up living the excitement of the space program, this will be a relatively detailed walk down memory lane and might provide some new tidbits of information. For others, this will serve as a great introduction to the tremendous work and cooperation that went into going from initial orbital flights to landing on the moon within one decade. So I recommend this to anyone who likes to read about space exploration. There are a lot of pictures, mostly ones that you may have seen before but they fit with what is being discussed. Not every book has to find some "never before seen" photos or information. Sometimes a well-told story we are familiar with is sufficient.

Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via Edelweiss. ( )