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
Apollo 10 According to the 2002 "Guinness World Records", Apollo 10 set the record for the highest speed attained by a manned vehicle: 39,897 km/h (11.08 km/s or 24,791 mph) on May 26, 1969, during the return from the Moon. The mission's call signs were the names of the "Peanuts" characters Charlie Brown and Snoopy, which became Apollo 10's semi-official mascots. "Peanuts" creator Charles Schulz also drew some mission-related artwork for NASA. Apollo 10 and Apollo 11 were the only Apollo missions whose crew were all veterans of spaceflight. Thomas P. Stafford had flown on Gemini 6 and Gemini 9; John W.