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 13 been dramatized multiple times, most notably in the 1995 film "Apollo 13". According to the standard crew rotation in place during the Apollo program, the prime crew for Apollo 13 would have been the backup crew for Apollo 10 with Mercury and Gemini veteran L. Gordon Cooper in command. That crew was composed of Deke Slayton, NASA's Director of Flight Crew Operations, never intended to rotate Cooper and Eisele to another mission, as both were out of favor with NASA management for various reasons (Cooper for his lax attitude towards training, and Eisele for incidents aboard Apollo 7 and an