 So, most of you are probably pretty familiar with the Gemini program, NASA's intern program between Mercury and Apollo, but did you know that it started life as Mercury Mark II? Because that's what we're talking about today on Vintage Space. The Mercury program was NASA's first manned spaceflight program, and its official goals were threefold. It was designed to put a man into Earth orbit, investigate how he would function in space, and also safely recover him from the ocean after a splashdown. The follow-up program to this first step into space began to take shape in the summer of 1961, more than half a year before NASA actually put a man into orbit. This new program was designed to take advantage of the lessons learned during the Mercury program and also use an operated Mercury spacecraft. As such, the program was provisionally called Mercury Mark II. The original proposal called for six program objectives to be met over the course of ten flights between March of 1963 and September of 1964. During that period, NASA expected to launch one mission every two months. The first objective was duration. NASA was already looking at manned lunar flights, and so had to make sure that both the men and the machines were up to the two-week journey. Under the Mercury Mark II program, the longest duration flight was a manned mission lasting seven days. An animal flight lasting 14 days would give NASA the objective of physiological data it wouldn't otherwise be able to gather. Studying the Van Allen belts was a secondary objective. Biological experiments would fly through this high-radiation environment to gather data. Controlled precision landings in a small landing area was third objective. This meant that the astronauts would have to have some way of controlling their spacecraft during descent, and the most obvious way to do this was to create the spacecraft with an off-center center of gravity so that there would be some aerodynamic lift. And actually, the original landing goal for Mercury Mark II was to have it land on land, not in the ocean. The fourth goal was rendezvous and docking, again an objective that fed into the Apollo program. The idea was to have the Mercury Mark II spacecraft dock with an Agena target vehicle in orbit. The fifth objective was increased astronaut training, which was really just a byproduct of running the program as it was anyways. The sixth and final goal of the Mercury Mark II program was a pretty interesting one. The idea was that if the Mercury Mark II program met all of its goals in a reasonable time, it might surpass Apollo, making the first lunar orbital flights. The Mercury Mark II program was renamed Gemini on January 3rd of 1962. And as the Gemini program, there were only three official goals to the program. The first was the duration flight lasting up to two weeks to simulate the time it would take to go to the moon and come back again. The second was the docking and rendezvous. And the third was a precision landing. Originally Gemini also wanted to do the land landings that Mercury Mark II had proposed, but the objective was eventually dropped in 1964. And one other note about the Gemini program, because I know people are going to ask about this, is why it's pronounced Gemini and not Gemini, like the zodiac sign or the constellation. I don't know why it's pronounced like that, but I know that in all of the old NASA videos and the progress reports about the Gemini program, it is pronounced Gemini. Within one second of the scheduled time, Gemini number one listed smoothly off the path. Case in point. So if you have any other questions about early spaceflight or not so early spaceflight, modern spaceflight is good too, leave them in the comments below and I will add them to my ever-growing list of topics for future episodes. And in the meantime, for space and predominantly vintage space type content every day of the week, be sure to follow me on Twitter as AST Vintage Space. And with new episodes going up every Tuesday and Friday, be sure to subscribe right here so you never miss an episode.