Apollo 15 to Apollo 12, and since Apollo 11's backup crew had been designated for Apollo 13 (which did not land on the Moon), they were the first Apollo crew for a successful lunar landing mission to have backed up another such mission. Having had the opportunity to familiarize themselves with the Apollo spacecraft, they could devote more of their training time as prime crew for Apollo 15 to geology and sampling techniques. The astronauts at NASA who were scientists, such as geologist Harrison Schmitt, pushed though the early Apollo missions for a greater place for science as part of the mission,
Harte Hanks that year with the purchase of the "Anderson Independent" and "Anderson Daily Mail" of Anderson, South Carolina, merging them into the "Anderson Independent-Mail". By 1980, the company owned 29 daily and 68 weekly newspapers, but its fastest growing division was consumer direct marketing, which included marketing agencies, market research firms and direct-mail distributors — the future core of today's Harte Hanks. In 1995, Harte Hanks sold to Community Newspaper Company its interest in the Massachusetts-based "Middlesex News", two other dailies, and associated weeklies in the western suburbs of Boston. It had owned the "News" since 1972 and bought the "News-Tribune"