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At the moment that I’m writing this review, the writing is on the wall for America’s dwindling fleet of space shuttles, which were mooted in the early ’70s as the great white-and-partially-black hope of the U.S. space program. A new workhorse spacecraft is on the drawing board (but not even in the testing stages) which will supposedly pick up where the shuttle left off, and apparently before that first launch date the new vehicle will have the good graces to hurry up and be finished and perfected. And if the new vehicle isn’t ready? Oops.

Before embarking on the Apollo program, NASA knew it’d have to develop certain key abilities in the relative safety of Earth orbit. Dusting off plans for a two-man “Mercury Mark II” capsule, the space agency went from Mercury to Gemini, an intermediate series of flights designed to test those abilities. Since Gemini came after the first-men-into-space Mercury flights, and before the first-men-on-the-moon Apollo flights, it’s often consigned to the “also-ran” category of history, or the memory of space geeks like myself. This 3-DVD set from Spacecraft Films preserves the existing footage and adds a documentary that puts it all in context for those who have forgotten.

The hour-long documentary piece, Project Gemini: A Bridge To The Moon, was written by “A Man On The Moon” author Andrew Chaikin. Covering each mission in at least a little detail with the appropriate accompanying footage (including the unmanned test launches Gemini 1 and Gemini 2), the whole thing is narrated in an old-school style that hearkens back to the very NASA films that it’s stepping in for. The restored footage, transferred fresh from the original film and occasionally accompanied by vintage audio recordings of air-to-ground chatter or pre/post-mission press conferences, looks fantastic to say the least - and there’s a good amount of it that hasn’t been seen until now. It’s highly doubtful that anyone who wasn’t at NASA at the time has ever seen, for example, the cockpit camera views recording the instrument panels of the unmanned Gemini test flights, or, for that matter, the footage of the landing tests that tried to incorporate a Rogallo glider wing to bring Gemini down on land instead of an ocean splashdown. (One piece of footage, showing a capsule that has landed intact - except for that part near the base of the heat shield that appears to have gone squish upon landing - demonstrates why NASA stuck with ocean splashdowns until the shuttle program.)

One of my first stops in this set was Gemini 8. That troubled 1966 mission could’ve cost its two crewmen their lives, except that the crewmen in question were hotshot rocket jocks and future Apollo astronauts Dave Scott and Neil Armstrong, both on their rookie flight. A problem with one of their Gemini capsule’s thrusters sent them spinning to the tune of one complete revolution per second in Earth orbit until they regained control. The mission was quickly aborted and the two astronauts returned safely (if nauseous). This incident was brilliantly dramatized in HBO’s outstanding series From The Earth To The Moon, but how does the real footage stack up? The truth is: there isn’t a huge amount of footage, likely because filming and taking photos quickly took a back seat as the crew realized they were in a crisis situation. But what footage there is does show, through the narrow cockpit windows, the Earth seeming to spin dizzyingly outside.

The Gemini 7 and Gemini 6 footage wins the prize on this set; this first-ever rendezvous between American spacecraft in orbit, with the two capsules closing to within a foot of each other (but not docking in any way because Gemini simply wasn’t designed for it), produces spectacular footage. It’s easy to forget in this day and age of watching every shuttle go to the space station and doing a big nose-to-tail roll, but at the time of this mission, one spacecraft simply getting close enough to another to see the astronauts through the window was a big deal, and the documentary makes a valid point that much of the Gemini program’s mission was to perfect rendezvous techniques without which the Apollo moon shots would have been impossible.

I felt a little let down that the Manned Orbiting Laboratory project wasn’t even mentioned at any point in this set; that aborted concept, which could’ve resulted in an Air Force-manned space station years before Skylab, was built around existing and - at least on the drawing board - upgraded Gemini vehicles. Lo and behold, when I went to contact Spacecraft Films about this, their web site was already announcing an upcoming DVD set about American military presence in space, including MOL. Problem solved!

As much as I’d like to see more people, especially those who have kids who are interested in the subject, take up an interest in space exploration and the history of what has already happened, the fact remains that the Project Gemini DVD set is best viewed by those who have enough of an interest to sit through what often amounts to silent movie footage. But when that footage includes the first American spacewalk, a spectacular close-quarters dance between two fast-moving vehicles, and what nearly became the first American space disaster, it seems like a strong case can be made that Gemini deserves something more than a somewhat obscure place in the history of space flight, for that audience, at least, I recommend Project Gemini.

And finally, does Gemini have some lessons for the space program today? I’d make a strong case for that too. With NASA setting rigid deadlines inside the next decade for a sudden switch from a fleet of vehicles whose blueprints were approved by the Nixon administration to a new vehicle whose blueprints are still not finalized, it seems that the concept of building an intermediate step has fallen between the cracks within NASA as well, not just with the public. Too much time has passed between getting the shuttle fleet up and running (and not just once, but multiple times, following multiple fatal accidents) and designing the vehicle that would follow. NASA couldn’t have achieved the moon flights on Kennedy’s schedule by jumping straight from Mercury to Apollo. With no replacement for the shuttle waiting in the wings, so to speak, we now run the dire risk of another “gap” in American space flight - similar to the six-year stretch between Apollo-Soyuz and the first shuttle launch - that will erode already-tenuous public interest and, within the space program itself, all-important know-how. Space exploration may yet pay the price for the lack of a modern-day equivalent to Gemini.