Project Gemini Astronaut  Training

   Before 1965 is many months old, a powerful Titan II rocket will blast off from Cape Kennedy, carrying two American astronauts aboard a spacecraft called Gemini-after the twins of the zodiac. For more than two years these men and their fellow astronauts have prepared themselves for Project Gemini and the epochal lunar voyages that will follow. They have pursued a unique training curriculum, and their classrooms lie scattered throughout the country.

   They have attended hundreds of lectures, pored over thousands of documents, and sat through countless technical meetings.

   They have conditioned their bodies to withstand grueling combinations of stresses: acceleration, weightlessness, noise, heat, cold, vibration, disorientation, and immobilization.

   They have learned to survive in Panama's tropical jungles and in Nevada's scorching deserts. They have studied the geology of steaming fumaroles, lava tubes, and ice caves. They have sunk their pickaxes into basalt, shale, and pre-Cambrian rocks.

   They have visited factories to watch embryo spacecraft take shape.

   They have practiced with dozens of training devices, simulating possible accidents and how to avoid them.

   Such exacting preparations have made American astronauts the world's most active commuters. Flying sleek, white-bellied supersonic trainers, they race the sun from coast to coast, squeezing extra hours out of the day and dragging white contrails in a crazy-quilt pattern across the heavens from Florida to California, Long Island to Oregon, St. Louis to the Nation's Capital.

   And, finally, home.

   Home is the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's Manned Spacecraft Center near Houton, Texas, 1,620 acres of laboratories, test chambers, and offices. Across its geometrical landscape, the great adventure of our time unfolds: a trip to the moon.

   To understand the magnitude of these events, look at the recent history of space. Less than two years ago, I stood in the Mercury Control Center as Maj. L. Gordon Cooper, J r., hurtled into orbit in his 4,000-pound, one-man capsule on this Nation's longest space flight: 34 1/3 hours. Now the 7,000-pound Gemini awaits her two-man crew and much longer orbital journeys…"