Apollo 11 as CMP, and Haise as LMP. Anders had flown with Lovell on Apollo 8. In early 1969, he accepted a job with the National Aeronautics and Space Council effective August 1969, and announced that he would retire as an astronaut at that time. Ken Mattingly was moved from the support crew into parallel training with Anders as backup CMP in case Apollo 11 was delayed past its intended July launch date, at which point Anders would be unavailable. Lovell, Haise, and Mattingly were later assigned as the prime crew of Apollo 13. During Projects Mercury and Gemini, each mission had
Apollo 9 module. It was also the first space docking of two vehicles with an internal crew transfer between them. For ten days, the astronauts put both Apollo spacecraft through their paces in Earth orbit, including an undocking and redocking of the LM with the CSM, just as the landing mission crew would perform in lunar orbit. Apollo 9 gave proof that the Apollo spacecraft were up to this critical task, on which the lives of lunar landing crews would depend. For this and all subsequent Apollo flights, the crews were allowed to name their own spacecraft (the last spacecraft to have