Blue Gemini Missile Spacecraft

The Blue Gemini Spacecraft, the closest humankind has ever come to a space fighter. Blue Gemini was a United States Air Force project first proposed in August 1962 for a series of seven flights of Gemini spacecraft to enable the Air Force to gain manned spaceflight experience prior to the launch of the Manned Orbital Development System, or MODS. The plan was to utilize off-the-shelf Gemini spacecraft.

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• Gemini
• Spacecraft
• US
• Air
• Force
• NASA

[awey271]

Now teh russians worred, they neva gonna get anything like this, now who gonna mess with democracy now

[spacemooseireland]

@awey271 Are you a redneck?

[HAL11000]

Imagine:

Blue Gemini Missile Spacecraft

vs

Soviet Polyus: Prototype orbital weapons platform.

[danibwr]

No dubstep??? Sh*t, wrong video...

[awey271]

@spacemooseireland

No, im actually an asian, good guess though



[JRhalo14]

i can imagine halo like mac guns becoming a reality within a few years if nasa gets to work

[spacemooseireland]

@gforce527 I believe that the Blue Gemini was actually a platform for anti-satellite missiles. As early as the 1960's satellites were being used in the cold war for military surveillance. The whole US space program was originally started (before Sputnik) for launching spy satellites by president Eisenhower (Almost no anti-ICBM weapon is very effective even today.). Blue Gemini in two launches would have been able to change its orbit and hunt down multiple enemy satellites in different orbits.

[gforce527]

@spacemooseireland I agree that comparing ICBM`s and orbital platforms is not a straightforward corelation. I was not thinking of the platform in any terms other than something like a stack of MIRV's in orbit poised to strike static targets (ie. enemy cities and military assets). If such a platform were tasked for intercepting missiles, honestly, how effective could a pair of guys in a gemini be at tracking and targeting opposing missiles especially at orbital velocity?

[spacemooseireland]

@gforce527 Your comparison of a space based weapons system to an ICBM is a bit misguided. The navigation mechanism for an ICBM was developed in WW2 by the Germans. You need a lot more computer power to be able to shoot down multiple separate moving targets all over the the world in. They were able to have navigation computers in the Apollo moon missions which were controlled mostly from the ground but Gemini was just one step up from Mercury capsules which had no computer control whatsoever.

[gforce527]

@spacemooseireland You are mistaken, I do get it. I'm aware computers took up whole buildings at that time, as I'm from the eve of that time. Gemini 1, 2 and Apollo 4,5,6 were run from the ground, and were successful. I'm just saying the gemini capsule with an astronaut, even at that time would have been completely redundant for an orbital weapons platform. After all, ICBMs already existed and certainly weren't manned. As long as ground tracking is maintained, targeting, and firing could occur.

[spacemooseireland]

@gforce527 You don't get it, computers were about 10,000 times less powerful then they are today in the 1960's the most powerful computers were the size of an entire building and about 1% as powerful as the computer in your cell phone today, and you would need more then a cell phone to run a space based weapons system.