Apollo 8 8 are the names of the three astronauts. The initial design of the insignia was developed by Jim Lovell, who reportedly sketched it while riding in the back seat of a T-38 flight from California to Houston shortly after learning of the Apollo 8's re-designation as a lunar-orbital mission. The crew wanted to name their spacecraft, but NASA did not allow it. The crew would have likely chosen "Columbiad", the name of the giant cannon that launches a space vehicle in Jules Verne's 1865 novel "From the Earth to the Moon". The Apollo 11 CM was named "Columbia" in part
Apollo 16 With the assistance of orbital photography obtained on the Apollo 14 mission, the Descartes site was determined to be safe enough for a manned landing. The specific landing site was between two young impact craters, North Ray and South Ray craters – in diameter, respectively – which provided "natural drill holes" which penetrated through the lunar regolith at the site, thus leaving exposed bedrock that could be sampled by the crew. After selecting the landing site for Apollo 16, sampling the Descartes and Cayley formations, two geologic units of the lunar highlands, was determined by mission planners to be the