If NASA had stuck with its original rosters, the crew of Apollo 9 should have flown on Apollo 8, circling the Moon during Christmas 1968. How did you take the news that you weren’t going to fly to the Moon after so much hard training?
Those were very complicated times, and the mission shifted all over. We were actually the backup crew for the first Apollo missions, including Apollo 7, but we were also going to pick up the Lunar Module and