Apollo 9 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. Apollo 9 was the first space test of the complete Apollo spacecraft, including the third critical piece of Apollo hardware besides the command and service module and the Saturn V launch vehicle—the lunar
HMS Apollo (1794) January, and "Apollo" was turned to give chase. The pursuit was hampered by thick fog, and at 7am on the following morning "Apollo" ran aground on the Haak Sandbank adjacent to Texel. Halkett ordered that the ship's stores and guns be thrown overboard in order to lighten her and float her free, but despite these efforts she remained stuck fast in the sands. In the late afternoon, a Prussian galliot was sighted and hailed by "Apollo"s crew. After some negotiation, the Prussian captain agreed to jettison the bulk of his cargo of wines and take 250 of "Apollo"s crew back