Apollo 9 - Original Mission Profile

Original Mission Profile

In April 1966, McDivitt, Scott, and Schweickart were selected as the backup crew to Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee for the planned first manned Earth orbital test flight of the Apollo Command/Service Module (CSM), designated AS-204 expected to fly in late 1966. This was to be followed by a second similar flight, AS-205, to be crewed by Wally Schirra, Walter Cunningham, and Donn Eisele.

However, delays in the CSM development pushed AS-204 into 1967. By December 1966, the original AS-205 mission was cancelled, Schirra's crew was named as Grissom's backup, and McDivitt's crew was promoted to prime crew for a new second mission, to fly the complete Apollo spacecraft, launching the CSM and Lunar Module (LM) on two separate Saturn IB vehicles into a low Earth orbit. They immediately began training for this flight, designated AS-205/208, expected to occur in late 1967.

On January 27, 1967, Grissom's crew were conducting a launch-pad test for their planned February 21 mission, which they named Apollo 1, when a fire broke out in the cabin, killing all three men and putting an 18-month hold on the manned program while the Command Module was redesigned for safety.

As it turned out, a 1967 launch of AS-205/208 would have been impossible even absent the Apollo 1 accident, as problems with the LM delayed its first unmanned test flight until January 1968. NASA was able to use the 18-month hiatus to catch up with development and unmanned testing of the LM and the Saturn V Moon launch vehicle.

By October 1967, planning for manned flights resumed, with Apollo 7 being the first Earth orbit CSM flight (now known as the C mission) in October 1968 given to Schirra's crew, and McDivitt's mission (now known as the D Mission) following as Apollo 8 in December 1968, using a single Saturn V instead of the two Saturn IBs. This would be followed by a higher Earth orbit flight (E Mission), to be crewed by Frank Borman, Michael Collins, and William Anders in early 1969.

However, continued LM production problems meant that the D Mission would not be able to fly until the spring of 1969, so NASA officials created another mission for Apollo 8 using the Saturn V to launch only the CSM on the first manned flight to orbit the Moon, and the E Mission was cancelled as unnecessary. Since McDivitt's crew had trained for the first LM mission, and he expressed the personal desire to fly it, the Borman and McDivitt crews were swapped, and the D mission became Apollo 9.

The crew swap also affected who would be the first crew to land on the Moon; when the crews for Apollo 8 and 9 were swapped, their backup crews were also swapped. Since the rule of thumb was for backup crews to fly as prime crew three missions later, this put Neil Armstrong's crew (Borman's backup) in position for the first landing mission Apollo 11 instead of Pete Conrad's crew, who made the second landing on Apollo 12.