ORIGINAL NASA EARTH GLOBE

USA, 1970 - 1990
37 × 37 × 42 cm

This is an original NASA Earth globe from the English collector David Worrow, a former NASA employee of Houston, Texas. It is the original Earth globe which has been used in various photos as a display for the portraits of the Gemini crew.

The Gemini astronauts consisted of sixteen pilots, who flew in Project Gemini, Nasa’s second human spaceflight program, between projects Mercury and Apollo. Gemini (latin) means 'twins', and NASA used the name for the Gemini spacecraft program because the Gemini capsule would carry two astronauts at a time, a senior command pilot and a junior pilot. The Gemini spacecraft was used for ten crewed missions. The missions helped NASA understand and master the challenges of spacewalking, rendez-vous and docking and long-duration spaceflight.

The Gemini program was the next step towards the Apollo program. Among the Gemini astronauts, six later walked the Moon, another five flew to the Moon without landing, and two participated in low Earth orbit Apollo missions. Gus Grissom and Ed White were killed in the Apollo 1 disaster. All Gemini astronauts – except for the Mercury Seven astronauts already included – were inducted into the U.S. Astronaut Hall of Fame in 1993.