One False Step by Richard Tongue Page A

rush requirement was evident, it seems likely that this would have been repeated on Gemini – so Gemini 16 and Gemini 17 would have been the test flights, with Gemini 18 the actual landing on the Moon – or possibly even a later flight, had problems occurred on the two dry runs.
     It seems doubtful that much time would have been saved in reaching the moon. The first lunar flyby was likely in 1967, and an orbit in 1968 would definitely been a practical proposition, but in the Apollo program, a key delay was the development of the LM, which stretched late into 1968; the first testing flights did not take place until 1969. The 'Gemini LM' would in many ways have been an even more difficult engineering proposition; reduced weight would not have meant reduced complexity, quite the reverse. Perhaps six months might have been shaved off the development program – which would have seen the first man walk on the moon in January 1969, perhaps December 1968 – in the launch window that was occupied by Apollo 8.
     An inevitable question is who, in this rotation, would have been the first man to land on the moon. One candidate would have been Gus Grissom; in Apollo, Deke Slayton pushed him as the first man on the moon, and had Apollo 1 flown, it was almost certain that he would have rotated to command that lunar landing – and he flew the first Gemini flight, and had a significant role in its design; some of the astronauts referred to it as the 'Gusmobile'. It is almost impossible to predict crew assignments with any accuracy – the Gemini assignments were partly designed to provide training for Apollo, and with no Apollo program, this schedule would have been changed.
     As for the astronaut corps in general; there would probably have been changes. Group III would certainly have been selected, and the pressure to admit scientists to the astronaut corps would have continued, so the Group IV scientist-astronauts would also likely been selected. Group V, however, would have been less likely to be selected – there would have been no need for nineteen new astronauts with far fewer flight assignments, only two astronauts per mission. It would have been hard to conceive Group VI, the second batch of scientist-astronauts, being selected, though the seventh Group – astronauts that had been selected for the USAF manned orbiting laboratory – would probably still have been transferred over, though some of them may have thought more carefully about accepting. Given that they were all trained for Gemini operations, they would have been strong candidates.
     If Gemini 18 was successful, it seems less likely that there would have been as many repeats. The capability of the proposed LM was marginal at best; without a cabin, stay time would have been limited to the life support potential of the astronaut's spacesuit, and this would almost certainly have meant only a couple of hours on the surface. Further, the ability to return samples from the surface would have been far reduced . The capacity to perform useful scientific work would have been far inferior to Apollo. A landing would likely have seen the astronaut plant a flag on the surface, and deploy a series of surface experiments, then taking a few samples of the lunar surface from the immediate vicinity of his craft; he would then have returned to the Gemini waiting in orbit.
     This author suspects that while there would have been a couple of repeats – Gemini 19 and Gemini 20, perhaps – that would have represented the conclusion of the Gemini moon program. Simply put, there was nowhere else to go with it. No capacity to increase the payload returned from the moon, no capacity to extend stay time, no capacity to include more equipment. The balance of probabilities is that the last American on the moon would have left the surface in 1969.
     Where from there? Well, Apollo had the Apollo Applications project, follow-on missions utilizing the same hardware, and there was a similar