Apollo 11 Apollo 11. The initial crew assignment of Commander Neil Armstrong, Command Module Pilot (CMP) Jim Lovell, and Lunar Module Pilot (LMP) Buzz Aldrin on the backup crew for Apollo 9 was officially announced on November 20, 1967. Lovell and Aldrin had previously flown together as the crew of Gemini 12. Due to design and manufacturing delays in the LM, Apollo 8 and Apollo 9 swapped prime and backup crews, and Armstrong's crew became the backup for Apollo 8. Based on the normal crew rotation scheme, Armstrong was then expected to command Apollo 11. There would be one change. Michael Collins,
Hervé Stevenin Environment Mission Operations (NEEMO 16). In September 2013, Stevenin and ESA astronaut Jean-François Clervoy slipped into the roles of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin for an underwater simulation test of Apollo 11 moonwalk tasks, organised by the Compagnie maritime d'expertises (COMEX) off the coast of Marseilles, France. They tested a COMEX-designed prototype training-spacesuit based on the Orlan adapted to simulate Moon gravity. Stevenin became an aquanaut through his participation in the NASA NEEMO 19 mission simulating undersea a space exploration mission aboard Aquarius, the world only undersea research laboratory with crewmates NASA astronaut Randy Bresnik, ESA astronaut Andreas Mogensen and