More Ambitious Projects

After Mercury, the United States began the Gemini program. A more powerful rocket, the Titan, was used, and the larger capsule
was fitted with maneuvering rockets so that the spaceship could change its orbit slightly. Hardly luxurious, the Gemini spacecraft nevertheless could support two astronauts for up to fourteen days, as on Gemini 7. The overall goals of the Gemini missions were to demonstrate the technology and to practice the skills needed to go to the Moon. These included docking with a booster rocket and performing basic tasks outside the space capsule. The 10 manned Gemini flights included more than 600 orbits of Earth without any major failures. NASA engineers declared that they were ready to move on to the Apollo program, which would involve three astronauts. 

The former Soviet Union was also developing missions for three space travelers. Their next spacecraft was called Soyuz, which means “union” in Russian. At first, the new program was plagued with failure. But just like the NASA engineers in the early 1960s, the Soviet engineers in the late 1960s kept working on the problems, and they solved them one by one. With many modifications and variations, the Soyuz design is still being used in the opening years of the twenty-first century.