RC:Moon Landing during the Kennedy Administration.

I recently bought a book, the "Lunar Exploration Scrapbook," which includes CGI and explanations of all variants of this idea. If I had a scanner, I could show them, but I'll have to settle for typing out the descriptions. Just give me some time to find it.

Ah, that's a cool book. I got it for my brother a while back.

EDIT: The POD for this might have to be in the late 1950s, though. Project Apollo, a 3-man spacecraft for LEO and circumlunar applications, was NASA's goal since Eisenhower, and was intended to be the direct follow-on to Mercury. When Kennedy announced the Lunar goal, the work done on the Apollo Command and Service Modules was just redirected as a lunar ship.

Yes, a better POD might be during the Eisenhower administration; have him be a bit more favorable towards space flight, choose the Army proposal for a space launch vehicle instead of the OTL Navy-Vanguard proposal, and you might be a year or two ahead. This probably wouldn't affect the 1960 election much, so you could still plausibly get Kennedy in. Have the Russians still launch first (hard, but possible), and he still does the "land on the Moon" thing; the extra year or so of serious development, combined with no Apollo fire, means that the first landing could take place in late 1968 or early 1969. Maybe even early 1968.
 
Sorry!! I meant to ask if they could fit a lunar rover in it. Moon buggy.

Maybe, but a Gemini-based lunar architecture would be even more inherently "flags and footprints" than the OTL Apollo one. They might not bother to do more than two or three lunar flights, then go back to LEO. One upside is that it's fairly likely that a non-Shuttle based post-mission plan will be adopted ITTL, so we can return to a von-Braunian "iterative exploration" architecture.
 
Maybe, but a Gemini-based lunar architecture would be even more inherently "flags and footprints" than the OTL Apollo one. They might not bother to do more than two or three lunar flights, then go back to LEO. One upside is that it's fairly likely that a non-Shuttle based post-mission plan will be adopted ITTL, so we can return to a von-Braunian "iterative exploration" architecture.

Another upside: If Lunar Gemini is adopted, Big Gemini becomes more likely. So we get Titans or cheaper Saturns launching Big Geminis to resupply Skylab- or MOL-derived stations through the 1970s.

Though, weren't most of Von Braun's Germans Shuttle advocates anyway? Von Braun, I think, made it clear in his plans for the Mars project that he believed fully reusable Shuttles were necessary.

I think Lunar Gemini could carry a rover, BTW, if you could somehow cut weight off elsewhere. The Lunar Roving Vehicle weighed only 210 kilos, after all.

But I must agree that, though it could have flown sooner, Lunar Gemini would have been less 'comfortable' for the astronauts (what with needing to kneel down to pilot it to a safe landing) and probably less capable overall.

On the other side of the coin, there would have been more commonality of hardware between a manned lander and an unmanned cargo lander. The Gemini capsule weighed almost 4 tonnes; the system to launch it back to earth would probably weigh as much. So, if one were to just remove the return system, one has a cargo lander that can put 8 tonnes of payload on the Moon.
 
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