Gemini: A Personal Account of Man's Venture Into Space

by Virgil I. Grissom

Astronaut Gus Grissom describes his role in the Mercury and Gemini programs, with most of the book focusing on the Gemini 3 spaceflight. The final chapter briefly discusses the future Apollo program.

Genres: Science, Nonfiction, History

212 pages, Hardcover

Published January 1, 1968

About the author

Served in the Air Force from 1950 to 1958, fighting in the Korean War then serving as a test pilot and flight instructor. In early 1959, he volunteered for the NASA space program and flew on the second Mercury spaceflight, the Liberty Bell 7. He also flew on the Gemini 3 mission in March 1965, becoming the first American to fly into space twice. He was killed in the Apollo 1 fire.

Reviews

[Syd Logsdon · Rating 4 out of 5]

Grissom was the second American in space and the command pilot of the first manned Gemini mission. He provides a first hand look at that program through it’s brief five year span, in a book was written just after the last Gemini flight.
Grissom’s style charmingly represents a working astronaut who is not a writer. Nevertheless, the book is haunted. We know that Grissom would die on the pad in Apollo One, weeks after handing in the manuscript. Nevertheless, the book is joyful, and clearly written my a man who loved what he was doing.
Gus says he was writing the book for his sons, and the sons and daughters of the other astronauts, and for other sons and daughters throughout America. For a full review, see http://sydlogsdon.com/2016/01/27/87-g...

[B.J. Marshall · Rating 3 out of 5]

Haunting lines in this book, finished just weeks before Grissom was killed in the Apollo I fire:

"For their part, the medical people weren't really happy over our 100 per cent oxygen supply..."

"That our rigorous training paid off is proven by the fact that not one astronaut was killed during the Gemini space missions."

And finally, three paragraphs from the end of the book,

"There will be risks, as there are in any experimental program, and sooner or later, inevitably, we're going to run head-on into the law of averages and lose somebody."

That page (and the book) ends dated "January, 1967". Sort of gets you, knowing that they were battling a spacecraft they weren't entirely confident in and trying to work out the last bugs. Was Gus being prescient there, musing about things best left unsaid, or just acknowledging that experimental flight programs are in fact hazardous. Impossible to know.

The book was a quick read and interesting almost as much from the perspective of what an astronaut thought the general public wanted in know in the mid-60s as much as what was actually said. As with my last book read (Never Panic Early by Fred Haise), I'm always in for a book by or about an astronaut. This one was certainly a better read than Haise's, but I guess I was just a bit disappointed because I wanted some more details of the flights.

I'm sort of on a quest to find out more about Gemini, the forgotten middle child of the early NASA projects. Apollo gets all the glory for landing on the moon, as well it should. And mercury gets a lot of attention for being first and all that. There's this fascinating engineering development step in the middle that is gemini that just seems to be forgotten. More to read out there somewhere, but glad I stopped by Gus's book on my way.

[WiscJennyAnn · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's no Carrying the Fire or The Right Stuff, but nice to read another perspective on Gemini(!). Little gems dating the book (e.g. references to NASA's incredible computing power... 2000b per sec!) and Grissom's all too prescient visions of what the future might hold make this book interesting. Largely it reads like a fluff piece, scrubbed clean by the indirect (or maybe direct?) influence of the space program's PR people. Maybe also a result of an audience expecting the Astronauts and space program to get up on their pedestal and stay there. But, in a way, that also makes the book an interesting document-- likely more in line with the language of the Life magazine profiles and articles. It's cool to read someone writing in the "public facing"/"all cleaned up" way, while knowing more of the back story from the other books (Carrying, TRS).

[Erik · Rating 4 out of 5]

Serviceable first-person account of the Gemini program by the first American to go into space twice. There were quite a lot of interesting nuggets of information I didn't know, some that were pretty funny (data transmission from mission control to an orbiting Gemini spacecraft was a blazing-fast .25kb/s), and a few, like Grissom's obvious excitement about being chosen for the Apollo program, that were pretty poignant in hindsight.