About Today’s Title

On March 23, 1965 Gus Grissom and John Young blasted off in Gemini 3, the first manned Gemini flight. It was a big step in the US space program and garnered world-wide attention. Something else gaining attention that year were the Beatles, the young British music act that had become a phenomenon in the US. On August 16th of 1965 the Beatlesr show at Shea Stadium in New York was the first major stadium concert. Over 55,000 fans packed the stands to see the Fab Four perform 12 songs, including the track Ticket to Ride, that gives this book review its title. There are full concert videos from Shea Stadium out there but check out this short YouTube video that gives you a shortened audio version of the song, along with some close-up video of Paul and John singing Ticket to Ride.

The Gemini program, in the words of author Jeffrey Kluger, was the middle child of the US’s 1960s space program that started with Mercury and ended with Apollo. While Mercury focused on getting an American (one per flight) in orbit around the Earth, Gemini missions carried two astronauts into orbit and focused on proving out key maneuvers that would be crucial to the goal of Apollo - manned missions to the surface of the moon.

Kluger is the author of several books about NASA missions, including Lost Moon: The Perilous Voyage of Apollo 13, co-authored with astronaut Jim Lovell, and the basis for the movie Apollo 13. Kluger notes that writing this book has been more of a challenge than his previous NASA related books. The first Gemini manned mission took flight in 1965, sixty years ago. That means that many of the people involved in the program are no longer living, including most of the astronauts (only Buzz Aldrin and David Scott are still with us), but also flight controllers, and NASA administrators who were responsible for sending the astronauts into space.

Kruger relied on interviews he has done in the past, recorded interviews and oral histories, original NASA documentation, press reporting and archival records. With all these at his disposal, and his past familiarity with NASA, Kruger has put together an entertaining and informative history of the Gemini program from beginning to end.

There’s also quite a bit of the Mercury program included. In fact, the first four chapters take us through the full Mercury program. I wasn’t sure at first why Kruger opted to tell the story this way, but in the end, I realized that it makes a lot of sense.

There were gaps in time between Mercury and Gemini, and less of a gap (but still a gap) between Gemini and Apollo. Each of these programs used different rockets and had different space capsules. From my perception, as a kid watching the Apollo missions, Mercury and Gemini were separate (and in my kid mind lesser, things). But from NASA’s perspective all three were part of the single mission to get Americans to the moon. So, to give Gemini it’s due you need to know what Mercury accomplished.

As it was for many other boys born in the early ‘60s the astronauts were my heroes. I followed all the Apollo missions as closely as I could as a youngster, but I was too young to really appreciate what had come before. For folks younger than me I would guess that what they know of the space program likely comes from movies like The Right Stuff and Apollo 13. From that perspective this is a much-needed book that helps to give the fuller picture of the early US space program, and the “race to the moon”.

My one complaint with the book is that the final two Gemini missions seem to get less attention than they deserved by Kluger. I would guess that since those missions went off with hardly a hitch, they didn’t pack the drama inherent in the earlier Gemini voyages that had to deal with issues arising from the pioneering nature of the program. Still, I would have liked to see those missions given as much attention as the others in this book, as without that fuller attention to them the overall story seems a bit incomplete. Other than that, I found this a great read

RATING: Four Stars ⭐⭐⭐⭐

RATING COMMENTS: Jeffrey Kluger sets NASA’s Gemini missions in their rightful place in the history of the US manned space missions, exploring the drama that followed the Mercury flights and paving the way for Apollo.

WHERE I GOT MY COPY: I read a reviewer’s copy of the book courtesy of St Martin’s Press and NetGalley. The book will be publicly available next Tuesday, November 11, 2025.