USS Hornet (CV-12) 27 March 1967. She reached Japan exactly a month later and departed the Sasebo base on 19 May for the war zone. She operated in Vietnamese waters throughout the first half of 1967. "Hornet" recovered the astronauts from the first moon landing mission, Apollo 11, on 24 July 1969. President Nixon was on board to welcome the returning astronauts back to Earth, where they lived in quarantine aboard "Hornet" prior to transfer to the Lunar Receiving Laboratory at Houston. The first steps on Earth of returning moonwalkers Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, with Command Module Pilot Michael Collins, are marked
Jim Lovell spacecraft, paved the way for the Apollo missions, and helped reach the goal of getting man on the Moon by the end of the decade. Lovell was originally chosen as Command Module pilot (CMP) on the backup crew for Apollo 9 along with Neil Armstrong as commander and Buzz Aldrin as lunar module pilot (LMP). Apollo 9 was planned as a high-apogee Earth orbital test of the Lunar Module (LM). Lovell later replaced Michael Collins as CMP on the Apollo 9 prime crew when Collins needed to have surgery for a bone spur on his spine. This reunited Lovell with