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
Journey of Apollo 15 to the Moon so that there was even heat distribution. Nearly 15 hours after launch, the crew switched off the lights in the cabin and went to sleep. The second day of Apollo 15 centered around the second planned midcourse correction and a preliminary check of the Lunar Module, "Falcon". Mission Control first got the crew to perform a 0.7 second burn of the SPS engine before the planned second course correction. This was designed to isolate the location of the short in the Delta-V Thrust switch. The burn allowed Mission Control to confirm that the SPS would only be ignited accidentally if