Race For Space

Volume 4: Practice Makes Perfect

Getting the basics right 1965-1966

By 1965, NASA was ready to take Project Apollo off the drawing board and into space.

Crucial to the agency's plans was Gemini-Titan, an interim two-man spacecraft-launcher combination that would allow the Apollo team to practice the complex orbital rendezvous and docking manoeuvres required to land a man on the Moon, and to test the cutting-edge technology needed for the trip. Along the way, courtesy of astronaut Ed White, came America’s first spacewalk, as well as some of the most iconic images of space exploration ever scene. But back on Earth, with Apollo itself falling ever further behind schedule, corners began to be cut that would have disastrous consequences down the line.

In the USSR, meanwhile, the nation’s long-postponed decision to race America to the Moon was dealt a hammer blow by the sudden death of Sergei Korolev – the man who had almost single handedly masterminded the early successes of the early Soviet space program. Part of Korolev’s remarkable legacy was a new three-man spacecraft – Soyuz – and a gigantic, but fatally flawed Moon rocket to rival von Braun’s Saturn V. How would his successors fare in getting these machines to fly? Would the Soviet Union’s early luck hold, or had it left it too late?


PLUS audio/video in the digital edition: