The Last of NASA's Original Pilot Astronauts by David J. Shayler & Colin Burgess

Author:David J. Shayler & Colin Burgess
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Springer International Publishing, Cham

Exchange of crews and missions

At the time of the crew amendments to the second and third missions, nothing was said of the discussions and evaluations being carried out behind the scenes. There were two CSMs ready to fly, but the LM would not be available until the following year, so the new plan was to delay the first manned test to early 1969 and move the McDivitt crew with it. His crew did not want to lose the D-mission which they had spent close to three years training for, but this had implications for the Borman crew, who had also trained to fly a LM that would now not be ready until the spring of 1969. To capitalize on their training and make use of the launch slot, Borman’s now CSM-only mission was pulled forward and renamed the C-Prime mission. But the most significant change to the second manned flight (now identified as Apollo 8) was that it would no longer just fly out to a 4,000-mile (6,437.3 km) apogee, as had originally been planned for the abandoned E mission. They would instead go all the way to the Moon, circling it ten times over the Christmas holidays. It would also be the first manned mission to use the Saturn V. These changes were announced on August 19. If they pulled it off, it would be an historic mission and a shot in the arm for Apollo; if they didn’t and the crew was lost, it could be the death blow to the Moon landing plan. This plan, coupled with the perceived threat of a mission by the Soviets to loop around the Moon before Apollo, meant that ‘Moon-race fever’ was at an all-time high. We know now that this Soviet mission was indeed planned, with crews in training, but that ongoing problems with Soviet hardware prevented the attempt from taking place.

As the prime and backup crews for the missions of Apollo 8 and 9 were exchanged, so too were the support crews. The Apollo 8 support crew would now be Brand, Carr and Mattingly, with Roosa (replacing Ed Mitchell who was in line to be named as backup LMP Apollo 10), Worden and Lousma supporting Apollo 9.

Roosa had been invited into the support crew role by none other than Alan Shepard who, like Deke Slayton, had been impressed by his work discipline. “Just be patient,” Shepard had told Roosa in offering the Apollo 9 support role. “I’ve got something in the works.” [ 24 ] That ‘something’ would become clearer a year later.

With the crews for the three missions finalized and in training, work continued behind the scenes to define surface activities for the first and subsequent lunar landings. For a while, Don Lind’s technical assignments focused on supporting these developments on the early landings. He followed the development of the equipment and established the procedures required for the two astronauts while they were out on the lunar surface. One of these assignments involved monitoring developments of the Apollo Lunar Surface Experiment Package (ALSEP), fabricated by the Bendix Corporation.

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