Project Gemini at the cape, 1965 to 1966

Gemini was the bridge between Mercury and Apollo, and every one of its crewed flights left from the same pad. “A total of 10 Gemini launches were flown from Complex 19 in 1965 and 1966,” the 1984 National Historic Landmark nomination for the station records. The first, Gemini III, lifted off on March 23, 1965; the last, Gemini XII, on November 11, 1966.

Launch Complex 19

Complex 19 was built in 1959 for testing large liquid-fueled missiles; a Titan I flew from it on February 2, 1960, to begin the Titan test program, and Gemini flew on the Titan II. The nomination describes a blockhouse, propellant farms, an astronaut recovery area, a water flume, and a launch stand 65 feet wide, 450 feet long and three stories high, with a 102-foot umbilical tower. Its service tower, the nomination says, was “simply laid down as if on a gigantic hinge,” and after each launch maintenance crews converged on the pad to repair what the exhaust had burned.

The Agena target vehicles that the later Gemini crews chased in orbit went up separately on Atlas rockets from Complex 14, the pad that had launched the orbital Mercury flights. On Gemini XII’s launch day, NASA’s record shows, the Agena left at 2:08 p.m. EST and the Gemini an hour and a half later.

The flights

NASA lists two uncrewed test flights, Gemini 1 and Gemini 2, before the ten with crews.

Flight	Crew	Note
Gemini III	Gus Grissom, John Young	First crewed Gemini; March 23, 1965
Gemini 4	James McDivitt, Edward White	June 3 to 7, 1965; first American spacewalk
Gemini 5	Gordon Cooper, Pete Conrad
Gemini 7	Frank Borman, Jim Lovell	14-day flight
Gemini 6A	Wally Schirra, Tom Stafford	Launched after Gemini 7 to rendezvous with it
Gemini 8	Neil Armstrong, David Scott
Gemini 9A	Tom Stafford, Gene Cernan
Gemini 10	John Young, Michael Collins
Gemini 11	Pete Conrad, Richard Gordon
Gemini XII	Jim Lovell, Buzz Aldrin	Final flight; November 11 to 15, 1966

Gemini III went up at 9:24 a.m. EST and made three orbits. At the end of the first, Grissom fired the thrusters to change the orbit, the first NASA mission in which a crew maneuvered its spacecraft in orbit. Gemini XII, launched at 3:46:33 p.m. EST, docked with its Agena, and Aldrin made three spacewalks before the crew splashed down on November 15.

Control moves to Houston

The first Gemini flights were run from the same building as Mercury’s. The original Mercury Control Center at the cape, the nomination says, was used for all Mercury flights and the first three Gemini flights, and after Gemini III flight control moved to the new center in Houston. The cape kept the launches. Mercury’s story is on our Mercury page, and the Apollo flights that followed on our Apollo page.

Further Reading

• Live from Cape Canaveral by Jay Barbree