09/26/2026
On November 11, 1966, Gemini 12 lifted off on the very last flight of NASA's Gemini program. The commander was Jim Lovell. His crewmate was a 36-year-old rookie named Buzz Aldrin.
Their main job: catch up with an unmanned target vehicle and dock with it. NASA had to prove astronauts could join 2 spacecraft in orbit, because the entire Moon plan depended on it. Docking leaves almost no room for error: aim slightly wrong and you drift past each other, or collide.
Then, 74 miles from the target, the radar failed.
"We don't seem to be able to get anything through the computer," Aldrin reported.
But NASA had picked the right man for this exact failure. Aldrin held a doctorate from MIT, and his thesis was about one subject: how to bring 2 spacecraft together in orbit. The other astronauts called him "Dr. Rendezvous." He had even helped design the backup charts the capsule carried.
So Aldrin did what sailors had done for centuries. He took out a sextant, measured the angles between his capsule and the target, checked the numbers against his charts, and worked out the corrections with a slide rule. Lovell fired the thrusters on Aldrin's numbers.
3 hours and 45 minutes into the flight, they reached the target. 28 minutes later, Lovell radioed 2 words: "We are docked."
They had arrived with most of their fuel unspent. The math was that precise.
The last Gemini flight proved something NASA needed to know before going to the Moon: if the machines failed, the astronauts could do it themselves.
3 years later, Buzz Aldrin walked on the Moon. And the commander sitting beside him on this flight was Jim Lovell, who 4 years later would fight for his life aboard Apollo 13.
