Canceled Apollo missions Schirra's crew would fly the C mission, first manned CSM (Block II CSM-101, retrofitted with the cabin safety improvements) as Apollo 7 in October 1968. McDivitt's crew and mission were kept as the first manned development LM flight (D mission); this was planned to be Apollo 8 in December 1968, now using a single Saturn V launch vehicle instead of two separate Saturn IB launches. The E mission was planned as an elliptical medium Earth orbit test of the operational LM with the CSM in a simulated lunar mission to an apogee of , to be commanded by Frank Borman
Apollo 21 21" lunar landing mission appears in three twenty-first-century works of fiction. The Apollo program used a Saturn V to launch the first manned test of the complete Apollo spacecraft, consisting of the Apollo Command/Service Module and a separate Apollo Lunar Module landing craft in a low Earth orbit, on the Apollo 9 mission. However, the original plan for this test would have used two launches of the smaller Saturn IB Earth-orbital launch vehicle: the first would launch the crew in the Command/Service Module, followed shortly by a second, unmanned launch of the Lunar Module, with which the crew would rendezvous