Gemini 11 capsule
McDonnell Aircraft for NASA · 1966
Not currently on display. The Samuel Oschin Air and Space Center opens to the public on 13 November 2026; before that date the object is not viewable. Confirm gallery placement on the museum website after opening. The capsule is on loan from the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum.
The dark, scorched cone in front of you carried two men around the Earth forty four times in September 1966. Gemini 11 was flown by Pete Conrad and Dick Gordon, and it set an altitude record of about eight hundred and fifty miles, higher than anyone had gone before, so high that the astronauts could see the curve of the whole planet for the first time. The capsule is the real one, on loan from the Smithsonian, and every mark on its skin was made by the heat of returning through the atmosphere at seventeen thousand miles an hour.
Walk around it and look at the size. The crew compartment is about the width of the front seats of a small car, and the two astronauts sat side by side in it for three days, with no room to stand. The blackened shingles that cover the outside are made of a heat-resistant alloy that expands and contracts as the temperature changes, overlapping like roof tiles. At the wide end is the heat shield, and at the narrow end the nose that held the parachutes and the docking equipment. The two hatches above the seats opened straight into space; Gordon climbed out of one for a spacewalk that exhausted him so badly it had to be cut short.
The Gemini programme, ten crewed flights in 1965 and 1966, taught NASA how to rendezvous, dock and work outside a spacecraft, all of which had to be mastered before anyone could go to the Moon. Gemini 11 docked with an Agena target rocket within its first orbit, a record, and then used the Agena's engine to reach its great height. Conrad went on to walk on the Moon on Apollo 12. The capsule has been in Los Angeles for decades and now shares the new space gallery with the Mercury and Apollo Soyuz capsules, so you can follow the three generations of American spacecraft in a single room.
Did You Know? Gemini 11 climbed so high that Pete Conrad, looking down, radioed that the Earth was round, a fact he could now confirm for himself.
Unlock the Full Guide
Read every room and listen to every work in all museums with premium.