Apollo 8 yet ready to make its first flight. Astronaut Jim McDivitt's crew, who were training to fly the first lunar module flight in low Earth orbit, became the crew for the Apollo 9 mission, and Borman's crew were moved to the Apollo 8 mission. This left Borman's crew with two to three months' less training and preparation time than originally planned, and replaced the planned lunar module training with translunar navigation training. Apollo 8 took 68 hours (almost three days) to travel the distance to the Moon. The crew orbited the Moon ten times over the course of 20 hours, during
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