Big Gemini

Big Gemini, also called Big G, was a spacecraft that McDonnell Douglas proposed to NASA and the US Air Force in the late 1960s as an enlarged successor to the Gemini capsule, although it actually had little in common with it. It was meant to carry crews and cargo to an orbiting space station, land at a preselected site on skids under a gliding parachute, and be refurbished and reused. Two baselines were defined, a nine-person minimum-modification version of the Gemini B and a twelve-person advanced version, and three launch vehicles were studied. Its mock-up was built in 1967, and NASA gave the concept serious consideration in 1971 as an interim option while a fully reusable shuttle looked unaffordable, but it was taken off the table in favour of a partially reusable orbiter shuttle.