Now playing: Gemini: Stepping Stone to the Moon—The Untold Story

This week’s list includes Gemini: Stepping Stone to the Moon—The Untold Story, from Hunter Shea. Press play and stay for every chapter.

From the widely followed novelist of Apollo 13 comes the high-tempo untold story of the pioneering Gemini program that was instrumental in getting Americans on the moon. Without Gemini, there would be no Apollo. After we first launched Americans into space but before we touched down on the moon’s surface, there was the Gemini program. It was no easy jump from manned missions in low-Earth orbit to a successful moon landing, and the ten-flight, twenty-month celestial story of the Gemini program is an extraordinary one. There was unavoidable darkness in the program—the deaths and near-deaths that defined it, and the blood feud with the Soviet Union that animated it. But there were undeniable and previously inconceivable successes. With a war raging in Vietnam and lawmakers calling for cuts to NAS

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