Bibliographical Note and List of Persons Interviewed

THIS history of Project Gemini rests ultimately on the paperwork generated by the project itself. Virtually all the documents cited in the notes are available in the History Archives, Johnson Space Center, Houston, Texas. Gathered over the past 12 years, these archives now comprise over 200 linear meters of filed and shelved documents, bearing not only on Gemini but on all American manned space flight programs - Mercury, Apollo, Skylab, Apollo-Soyuz, and Shuttle - as well as the institutional history of the Center and some special topics such as space-suit development.

Most of the material on which this book is based does not lend itself easily to listing in a formal bibliography. The published and unpublished documents listed below thus represent, in a sense, only the tip of the iceberg - those items that may be conveniently cited; as the notes clearly show, they in no way approach a description of the sources. In fact, they tend to be the most peripheral. In the ongoing work of Project Gemini, whose fallout provided most of the evidence for our attempt to tell the story, there was little time or opportunity for the writing, much less the publication, of the more formal books or articles that lend themselves to citation. The nature of Project Gemini, as sketched in the introduction and displayed in the book, has also meant that the years since its completion have added little to the story.

In this note, we shall make some effort to describe the nature of the sources that we have used. The backbone of the Gemini history was chiefly provided by a class of material that might be labeled serial documents. Probably the most important of these were the regular, recurring progress, status, and activity reports submitted by contractors to NASA and by lower NASA elements to higher. They vary greatly in content, format, quality, and usefulness, but they often provide the major, sometimes the only, basis for reconstructing the sequence and significance of particular events, especially during Gemini’s developmental period. Among the more helpful of these reports were:

Lockheed Missiles& Space Co. “Gemini Agena Target Vehicle Program Progress Report.” LMSC-A605200-1 to -16. Sunnyvale, Calif., 20 Oct. 1964 - 20 Dec. 1965.
—. “Medium Space Vehicles Programs Monthly Progress Report.” LMSC-447186-26 to -47. Sunnyvale, Calif., 20 Sept. 1962 - 20 May 1964.
North American Aviation, Inc. “Contract NAS 9-167, Paraglider Development Program, Phase II, Part A, Monthly Progress Letter No. 1,” 20 Nov. 1961, through “. . . No. 16,” 31 March 1963.
—. “Contract NAS 9-539, Paraglider Development Program, Advanced Trainer and Prototype Wing Design, Phase II, Part B(1), Monthly Progress Letter No. 1,” 20 June 1962, through “. . . No. 9,” 31 March 1963.
—.”Contract NAS 9-1484, Paraglider Landing System Program, Monthly Progress Report No. 1,” for May 1963 through “. . . No. 21,” for Jan. 1965.
U.S., Air Force, Space Systems Division (SSD). “Titan II/Gemini Program Status Summary.” Weekly letters, SSD to NASA Assoc., Adm., 18 Sept. 1963 to 27 Jan. 1964.
U.S., NASA, Manned Spacecraft Center. “Weekly Activity Report for the Office of Director [later Associate Administrator], Manned Space Flight.” Houston, 27 May 1962 - 7 Aug. 1965.
—. “Consolidated [monthly] Activity Report for the Office of the Director [later Associate Administrator], Manned Space Flight.” Houston, May 1962 - Jan. 1965.
—.”Quarterly Activity Report for the Office of the Associate Administrator, Manned Space Flight.” Houston, 30 April 1965 - 30 July 1966.
—. Gemini Project [later Program] Office. “GPO Weekly Activity Report for the Director, MSC.” Houston, 5 March 1962 - 10 April 1965.
—. “Project Gemini Quarterly Status Report No. 1, for period ending May 31, 1962,” through “. . . No. 17, for period ending May 31, 1966.”
U.S., NASA, Marshall Space Flight Center. “First Report on MSFC Activities Covering February 26 thru March 25, 1962, to Manned Spacecraft Center,” through “Thirteenth . . . November 1 thru November 16, 1962, . . “

A second group of serial documents comprised the official minutes and sometimes the informal notes of meetings of the boards and panels that supervised or dealt with various aspects of the Gemini program. The most directly involved were the coordination panels, which were largely responsible for the day-to-day decision-making in Gemini development (as discussed in Chapter IV). The abstracts of these coordination panel meetings record the decisions taken and, sometimes, the reasons for them; ordinarily, though, the reasons for the decisions must be sought elsewhere, since the abstracts tend to be brief to the point of being cryptic. The six panels first set up early in 1962 - spacecraft mechanical systems, electrical systems, operations; Atlas-Agena, Gemini launch vehicle, and paragliders - were later joined by others to deal with particular areas as they became important. Among these were launch guidance and control, rendezvous and reentry guidance and control, trajectories and orbits, launch integration, range safety, network integration, and experiments.

Besides the coordination panels, Gemini was served by a number of other boards and panels, the minutes of which were often helpful, particularly in pinning down the precise nature of problems as understood at particular times, since the experts were faced with explaining their piece of the program to what were essentially knowledgeable outsiders. The most useful records were those of:

Gemini Mission Review Board. July-Oct. 1966.
Gemini Project/Program Office Staff Meetings. 1963-1966.
Manned Spacecraft Center Senior Staff Meetings. July 1961-Sept. 1966.
Manned Space Flight Experiments Board. 1964-1966.
NASA-DOD Gemini Program Planning Board. Feb. 1963-April 1964.
NASA/MAC Management Meetings. 1964-1966.
NASA Management Council. Dec. 1961-Sept. 1963.
Project Gemini Management Panel. Nov. 1962-Feb. 1965.

Another class of relatively formal documents that were indispensable in writing the Gemini history were the contracts between NASA and the organizations that did most of the actual work of development and operation. This is not the place for a treatise on contracting, but a few points are worth noting. The initial agreement usually took the form of a letter contract, a means of getting work started before or while negotiations took place. Eventually the letter contract gave way to the negotiated or final contract. The basic document normally included a “statement of work,” particularly useful for the historian in furnishing a clear and direct statement of what the contractor agreed to provide. Major contracts were regularly changed, supplemented, amended, etc., each producing a notice added to the basic contract. A complete list of major Gemini contractors, subcontractors, and vendors may be consulted in James M. Grimwood and Barton C. Hacker, Project Gemini Technology and Operations: A Chronology, NASA SP4002 (Washington, 1969), pp. 284-89.

Useful for following the changes in organization and administration of the Manned Spacecraft Center and of the Gemini Program Office were three sets of internal publications. MSC Announcements, numbered serially for each year, were the means of notifying Center employees of changes as they occurred. The semi-official MSC Space News Roundup was a bi-weekly newspaper focused on local news, which also contained stories about the Centers programs as well. The periodically revised MSC telephone directories were particularly helpful in determining the exact positions of people working on Project Gemini at particular times.

As the notes to the text should make clear, our major reliance was on the working documents directly related to the conduct of Project Gemini - the memorandums, letters, teletype communications, and other messages that described, explained, ordered, informed, coordinated, and otherwise kept the several parts of Gemini in touch with each other and with the outside world. One point that should probably be made is that the person who signs a message is often not its author. This is almost invariably true for interagency communications, less commonly true internally. This is the major reason we have usually preferred to identify organizations - e.g., Gemini Project Office, Space Systems Division - as the actors in our history. This trait is not unique to NASA, of course, but it clearly influences the kind of history that may be written of a NASA program.

Of considerable value as background material were a variety of documents related to NASA’s efforts to maintain its public image. The MSC fact sheets, printed at the Center and distributed throughout the world, may have been the most widely read source of public information on Gemini. Among them were a series on the Gemini missions by Ivan D. Ertel, beginning with MSC Fact Sheet No.291, Gemini Program, and followed by Fact Sheet Nos. 291-A through 291-I, April 1965 to December 1966, dealing with Gemini missions from the third through the twelfth. NASA also prepared and distributed to reporters a press kit for each mission. These kits were substantial compilations running to dozens of pages, intended to provide a comprehensive background for news stories about the missions. Other press materials were also helpful: the press handbooks prepared by some Gemini contractors (Martin, McDonnell, and Lockheed, in particular, which are cited here); transcripts of NASA-conducted press conferences during missions and on some other occasions (e.g., the introduction of newly selected astronauts); and such regular mission-related briefings as the one at each change of shift. These materials were often helpful in filling out the more technical record provided by the Gemini mission evaluation team in the Mission Report (this and the following are cited in full in the bibliography), as supplemented by the technical debriefings of the crew, by special detailed studies on particular aspects of a mission (e.g., launch vehicle performance), and by the transcript of all communications between ground and flight crews during the course of a mission.

NASA distributes internally a daily compilation of current news, photoduplicated articles on space-related topics from a broad spectrum of newspapers. The JSC History Office has a file of this compilation beginning in 1958. Another useful source of reaction to NASA activities is the trade press. Numerous journals are devoted to the doings of the aerospace industry; the two we found most consistently useful were Aviation Week and Space Technology and Missiles and Rockets.

Interviews were a major source for this history. The chance to put questions to the people who actually did what we were writing about went a long way to compensate for the difficulties of studying contemporary history. Cooperation was general, whether in small matters or large. Two types of interviews appear in the following list. Most were lengthy conversations that were tape-recorded and subsequently transcribed; the typescripts of these interviews are on file in the JSC History Office. We also conducted much briefer interviews by telephone; these were usually addressed to relatively specific matters of fact or information and were not recorded, although notes may have been taken. Interviews in this latter category are marked by an asterisk in the following list.

People Interviewed

Albert, John G.
Aldrin, Edwin E., Jr.
Alexander, James D.*
Alphin, James H.*
Amman, Ernest A.
Andrich, Stephen M.
Armstrong, Neil A.
Armstrong, Stephen D.
Armstrong, William O.
Babb, Conrad D.
Bachman, Dale
Bailey, Glenn F.
Bake, Ronald C.*
Ballentine, Wilbur A.
Barton, John
Bates, James R.*
Bell, Larry E.
Berry, Charles A.
Bickers, John H.
Bird, John D.
Black, Dugald O.*
Black, Stanley
Blackert, Robert S.
Bland, William M., Jr.*
Blatz, William J.
Borman, Frank
Bost, James E.*
Bowles, Lamar D.*
Boyd, John H., Jr.*
Boynton, John H.*
Bratton, R. Dean*
Buhler, Cary
Burke, Walter F.
Byerly, Kirk L.
Byrnes, Martin A., Jr.
Cernan, Eugene A.
Chamberlin, James A.
Chambers, Gordon T.
Charlesworth, Clifford E.
Cherry, Clyde S.
Christopher, Kenneth W.
Church, John
Clements, Henry E.*
Cohen, Haggai
Cohen, Robert
Collins, Michael
Conrad, Charles, Jr.
Cooper, L. Gordon, Jr.
Correale, James V.*
Cottee, Gatha F.*
Crane, Richard J.*
Cress, Gordon P.
Curlander, J. Carroll
Czarnik, Marvin R.
Davis, Larry D.*
Day, LeRoy E.
Deans, Philip M.*
Decker, James L.*
Dietlein, Lawrence F.
Dineen, Richard C.
Disher, John H.*
Domokos, Steven J.
Dotts, Homer W.*
Douglas, W. Harry*
Duggan, Orton L.*
Dunkelman, Lawrence
Dunn, Charles E.
Eggleston, John M.
Ellmer, Paul
Elms, James C.*
Emigh, Harold
Engstrom, Bert
Evans, Tom
Evans, W. B.*
Everline, Robert T.*
Farguson, Dale
Fisher, Lewis R.
Fore, Wallace
Foster, Norman G.
Franklin, George C.*
Friedman, Stanley
Fucci, James R.*
Funk, Ben I.
Furman, Francis O.
Gellerman, Joseph B.
Gerathewohl, Siegfried J.
Gibbons, Howard I.*
Gill, Jocelyn R.
Gilruth, Robert R.
Gordon, Richard F., Jr.
Gray, Wilbur H.
Green, Don J.
Griffin, James J.
Grimm, Dean F.
Hahn, Jack R.
Hall, Eldon W.
Hammack, Jerome B.
Haney, Paul P.
Harness, Arminta
Harris, Howard T.
Hanger, Lloyd
Hecht, Kenneth F.
Heimstadt, C. E.
Hello, Bastian
Helsel, Ron
Henry, James P.*
Hill, Raymond D., Jr.
Hobokan, Andrew
Hodge, John D.
Hohmann, Bernhard A.
Hollands, Rockwell
Houbolt, John C.
Huff, Vearl N.
Hull, Robert R.
Huss, Carl R.*
Hutchison, Fountain M.
Hutchison, Homer W.
Jackson, James B., Jr.
Jackson, Lee
James, Bennett W.
James, George
Jeffs, George W.
Jevas, Nicholas*
Jimerson, Leroy S.
Joachim, James W.
Johnson, Harold I.
Kapp, Michael
Kapryan, Walter J.
Keehn, Richard W.
King, John W.*
Kleinknecht, Kenneth S.
Koons, Wayne E.*
Kranz, Eugene F.
Kuehnel, Helmut A.*
Lang, Dave W.
Lang, David D.*
Lansdowne, Kathryn A.*
Ledlie, James
Lenz, James
Letsch, Ernst R.
Lindley, Robert N.
Lineberry, Edgar C.
Lopez, Sarah W.*
Lovell, James A., Jr.
Low, George M.
Luetjen, H. H.
Lunney, Glynn S.*
Lutz, Charles C.
McBarron, James W., II*
McCabe, Robert
McCafferty, Riley D.
McCreavey, William
McDivitt, James A.
McFadden, Eugene R.
McKee, Donald D.
McMann, Harold J.
MacDougall, George F., Jr.*
Machell, Reginald M.
Manry, Charles E.*
Marbach, James*
Mathews, Charles W.
May, Bill
Mayer, John P.*
Meyer, André J., Jr.
Miglicco, Percy S.
Miller, John
Mitchell, Willis B., Jr.
Mitros, Edward F.*
Morgan, Frank G., Jr.
Morrow, Lola H.
Mueller, George E.
Muhly, William C.*
Nagler, Kenneth M.*
Nolan, Harold W.
Nold, Winston D.
North, Warren J.
Oldeg, Harry W.
Petersen, Jean L.*
Poole, Forrest R.
Preston, G. Merritt
Provart, Robert
Purchase, Alan
Purser, Paul E.
Raines, Ray
Rapp, Rita M.*
Ray, Hilary A.*
Ringer, Jerome
Rose, James T.
Rose, Rodney G.*
Russell, John H.
Samonski, Joan P.*
Sanders, Fred J.
Sanderson, Alan N.*
Satterfield, James M.*
Saunders, James F., Jr.*
Schirra, Walter M., Jr.
Schlicker, Albert
Schmitt, Joe W.*
Schneider, William C.
Schroeder, Lyle C.*
Schweickart, Russell L.
Scott, David R.
Seamans, Robert C., Jr.
Sharp, Robert L.
Sheckells, George
Shoaf, Harry C.*
Shoenhair, Jack L.
Shuck, Lowell
Simpkinson, Scott H.
Sims, John R.
Slaughter, Frances*
Smistad, Olav*
Smith, Herbert E.*
Smith, Walter D.
Spath, Richard M.
Stafford, Thomas P.
Stewart, Larry E.
Stewart, Lester A.*
Stiff, Ray C., Jr.
Stullken, Donald E.*
Summerfelt, William A.
Swanson, John
Sweeney, John L.
Tenebaum, Dan M.
Thackston, Willard
Tindall, Howard W., Jr.
Tomlinson, Charles C.
Towner, George
Trombka, Jacob L.
Truszynski, Gerald M.
Tucker, Elton M.*
Van Bockel, John J.
Van Riper, Paul P.
Verlander, Joseph M.
Verrengia, Augustine A.*
Verrier, Don
Vester, Ben
Vogel, Harle L.
Waggoner, James
Wambolt, Joseph F.
Ward, E. Douglas
Weber, George J.*
Wendt, Guenter F.
Westkaemper, Robert M.
Whitacre, Horace E.
Williams, John J.
Williams, Walter C.
Williams, Wiley E.
Wilson, Louis D.
Wolhart, Walter D.
Workman, Robert O.
Wyatt, DeMarquis D.
Yardley, John F.
York, Irving
Young, John W.
Young, Kenneth A.*
Young, Richard S.*
Young, Robert B.
Younger, George B.
Zahn, Toni*
Zeitler, Edward O.*

Still another group of sources deserves special mention - the comments we received on draft chapters of this history and on draft versions of Project Gemini Technology and Operations. These comments varied considerably in scope, format, and value, but a number were substantial and documented critiques on the text. The relevant comments are cited in the notes.

The bulk of the remaining sources are listed in the following bibliography. Any classification must inevitably be arbitrary, at least in part. We have divided the primary sources into four classes: (1) Studies, Proposals, Long-Range Plans, and other documents mostly related to Gemini’s formative stages; (2) Gemini Plans, Procedures, Working Papers, Design Notes, and other materials related directly to the operation of the program; (3) Gemini Reports, Reviews, Evaluations and other assessments of the conduct of the project; and (4) Printed Primary Sources. Secondary sources have merely been separated into two classes: (5) Unpublished Secondary Sources and (6) Published Secondary Sources.