Gemini: Stepping Stone to the Moon, the Untold Story by  Jeffrey Kluger 

Review by Geoff Robertson

Between the one man Mercury, NASA’s first program to send a human into space, and the three man Apollo, which took human to the surface of the Moon and back, there was Gemini, the two seat spacecraft that in ten manned flights demonstrated the techniques and procedures needed to fulfil President Kennedy’s 1961 challenge to land a man on the Moon and return him to the Earth by the end of the 1960’s.      

I am of a certain age that the first book I ever read about Project Gemini came from my schools library in 1964, before the first crew had flown a single orbit. I followed the ten crewed flights between 1965 and 66 religiously, getting up early in the morning to watch launches, following the mission on the news and then waiting for the photo story in Life magazine to arrive in our mailbox after splashdown.    

Jeffery Kluger who co-wrote Lost Moon with Jim Lovell, about the Apollo 13 mission, and was the inspiration for Ron Howards 1995 film, published a new book in 2025 titled Gemini: Stepping Stone to the Moon. 

In its 271 pages, beginning with a prologue describing the near disastrous EVA during the Gemini 9 mission,  Kluger recounts the early days of the space program and the politics that drove it both in the US but also in the Soviet Union. It gets into the personalities of the day, and the engineering and designs that were considered for the Gemini spacecraft. It delves extensively into a feature that I first saw in that book from the school library back in 1964, the Rogallo Wing, a parasail that would deploy from the spacecraft instead of a parachute allowing Gemini to glide to a landing on dry land on skids extending from the base of the craft. It was found to be too complicated and parachutes were used for an ocean landing. 

Recounting the actual missions of each of the ten manned flights does not begin until more than halfway through the book. It covers each mission fairly well, noting the highlights and some of the lesser known incidents of the missions. The chapters on Gemini 6/7 and Gemini 8 were very interesting to me, although I did note something Kluger’s editor missed. After Gemini Eight made and emergency landing south of Japan, it mentioned when the recovery ship reached the spacecraft and secured it, the crew opened their hatches and “breathed in the cool Atlantic air”.  

The epilogue begins with the Apollo 1 fire and ends with the Moon landing.    

I’ve read many books about the space program as well as astronaut biography’s. There was some things in this book I had not run across before but not a lot. Still it’s an enjoyable quick read. For someone not familiar with the Gemini program and or the first decade of the space age, I highly recommend it.               

Jeffrey Kluger is Editor at Large at Time, where he has written more than 45 cover stories. Coauthor of Lost Moon: The Perilous Voyage of Apollo 13, which was the basis for the movie Apollo 13, he is also the author of 13 other books including his latest book Gemini: Stepping Stone to the Moon, the Untold Story.

This book will be available at the conclusion of the March 9, 2026 RASC meeting.  The Lamplighter Library is just off the main entrance to the Zeidler Dome and is open before and after our meetings.

Librarian