Six decades have now passed since some of the most iconic Project Gemini spaceflights. The 60th anniversary of Gemini 4, when Ed White conducted the first US spacewalk, came in June. The next mission, Gemini 5, ended just two weeks ago, in 1965. These missions are now forgotten by most Americans, as most of the people alive during that time are now deceased.
However, during these early years of spaceflight, NASA engineers and astronauts cut their teeth on a variety of spaceflight firsts, flying a series of harrowing missions during which it seems a miracle that no one died.
Because the Gemini missions, as well as NASA's first human spaceflight program Mercury, yielded such amazing stories, I was thrilled to realize that a new book has recently been published—Gemini & Mercury Remastered—that brings them back to life in vivid color.
The book is a collection of 300 photographs from NASA's Mercury and Gemini programs during the 1960s, in which Andy Saunders has meticulously restored the images and then deeply researched their background to more fully tell the stories behind them. The end result is a beautiful and powerful reminder of just how brave America's first pioneers in space were. What follows is a lightly edited conversation with Saunders about how he developed the book and some of his favorite stories from it.
Ars: Why put out a book on Mercury and Gemini now?
Andy Saunders: Well, it's the 60th anniversaries of the Gemini missions, but the book is really the prequel to my first book, Apollo Remastered. This is about the missions that came before. So it takes us right back to the very dawn of human space exploration, back to the very beginning, and this was always a project I was going to work on next. Because, as well as being obviously very important in spaceflight history, they're very important in terms of human history, the human evolution, even, you know, the first time we were able to escape Earth.