Photomontage of the launch of the Titan rocket carrying John Young and Michael Collins to the highest Earth orbit hitherto reached by humans, 18July 1966

Vintage chromogenic print on fiber-based paper, printed 1966, with "A KODAK PAPER" watermark on verso, 20,3 x 25,4 cm

The Gemini-Titan X spacecraft carrying astronauts John Young, Command Pilot, and Michael Collins Pilot, was successfully launched by the NASA from the Kennedy Space Center’s (KSC) Launch Complex 19 at 5:20 p.m. (EST), July 18, 1966, boosting the astronauts into a 187-by-99-mile elliptical orbit within fourteen minutes. An Atlas rocket carrying the Agena 10 was launched one hour and nineteen minutes earlier.

Like the two previous Gemini flights, the Gemini X plan included rendezvous and docking with the separately launched Agena spacecraft which would boost Young and Collins to new
heights upward to a record 475 mile altitude.Additionally, this mission would be the first to include two spacewalks.

John Young was a veteran of the first mission in America's two-man spacecraft. A naval aviator, he would go on to fly to the moon twice, aboard Apollo 10 in 1969 and he also commanded the Apollo 16 lunar landing in 1972.