My lovely enabler, Melanie

This particular page is from page  of the February 1967 issue of Model Airplane News magazine. It is the first time I can recall seeing this contest by Revell that offered to the winner a "full-size Gemini spacecraft!" In 1967, I was nine years old and was a model rocket lover. Like me, a lot of kids would all have - in the vernacular of the day - "given our right arms" to win a contest like this!

See the ad below.

A couple years ago, I wrote a short article on an experience I had way back in the 1970s where a friend, Jerry Flynn, and I discovered an actual Gemini space capsule that had been used for a human flight sitting in the aeronautics laboratory at the University of Maryland; the ablation shield was clearly burned. It was sitting on a dolly, nose up, with the access hatch open. It was begging to an occupant. We each actually climbed into the module. Click here to read it.

I just did a Google search on this contest and amazingly enough, someone else recently posted the same question about a year ago and actually has a copy of the report in Boy's Life magazine. It turns out that a 13-year-old kid in Portland, Oregon won it, and the Gemini prototype is now on display at the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry. That is a photo of it to the left. Here is a link to the article (unfortunately, the link is no longer active). There were many iterations of the Gemini capsule, and this one appears to be the Gemini V model. The one that Jerry and I sat in was the shorter Gemini IV model, if I remember correctly.

 

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