00:00The first American attempt ever to send people into space.
00:05But in between, there's a program that surprisingly rarely takes center stage.
00:10Although, without this program, Apollo would most likely have failed.
00:15Of course, we're talking about Gemini.
00:17Not spectacular enough to achieve mystic status,
00:20not primitive enough to evoke a pioneer spirit,
00:24but technically, perhaps, the most important space program in all of human history.
00:29Because Gemini had a single task,
00:32to find out whether humans could even travel to the moon.
00:37And for that, NASA had to learn things within just a few years
00:41that literally no one on this planet had known before.
00:45Here are some of the questions Gemini was supposed to answer.
00:49How do you dock two spacecraft in orbit?
00:51How does a person survive two weeks in space?
00:54Can you walk in a vacuum?
00:56How do you navigate precisely, without GPS?
00:59How do you land in a controlled way from orbits?
01:02All these questions were completely unsolved in the early 1960s.
01:07Apollo was the goal.
01:09Gemini was the experiment.
01:12And without the experiment, no moon.
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