GEMINI

The Cold War countdown to Apollo.

Wedged between NASA’s Mercury program, which rocketed the first Americans into space, and Apollo, which left their footprints on the moon, was Gemini—a 12-mission program that ran from 1961 to 1966. Kluger, a Time magazine editor at large, believes this “middle sibling of the manned space program” has been overshadowed for too long—in part by Kluger’s own work; his 1994 Lost Moon (written with astronaut Jim Lovell) formed the basis of the film Apollo 13. Now Kluger has rendered Gemini equally cinematic. His page-turning prose is written with new journalistic bravado that perfectly captures “a nation that wanted to think of its astronauts as a robust breed of men who ate well, trained hard, flew straight, and came home.” The book has its share of colorful figures—there’s John Glenn, camera ready; Neil Armstrong, haunted by his daughter’s death; Chris Kraft barking orders from mission control—but lacks a main character to hold things together as the narrative launches from one mission to the next. The real throughline is the Cold War. Political panic triggered by Sputnik was the fuel in Gemini’s rockets. Kluger makes palpable President Kennedy’s distress when, in 1961, Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin beat Alan Shepard into space. The U.S. was still trying to get an edge over the Soviets during Gemini 8 when, for heart-pounding pages, Armstrong and Dave Scott’s spacecraft spun out of control—a short circuit in the thruster system—and the astronauts fought to steady the ship as they slipped out of consciousness, a tense scene that ends in an early splashdown. But Gemini was a grand success. “Sixteen men had gone into space across ten crewed missions—and sixteen had come home.” They’d demonstrated all the skills that would take NASA to the moon, contributing, Kluger writes, “to a cascading series of economic, engineering, and political victories that helped bring the original Cold War to a peaceful end.”

Impressively researched and stylishly written, the history of the space race achieves liftoff.