One of my reasons as to why Neil Armstrong was chosen to be the first to set foot on the Moon was because of how he properly handled the stuck thruster problem during the Gemini 8 mission.
They didn't want a joker like Pete Conrad to be the first guy on the Moon because he might say something undignified or silly when he stepped off the ladder.
Deke Slayton was principally in charge of crew assignments and he had a good sense of who should go on what missions and which astronauts worked well together and had compatible personalities.As I understand it, Slayton chose Armstrong because he was a soft-spoken and ultra-professional kind of guy who took himself and the mission seriously. They didn't want a joker like Pete Conrad to be the first guy on the Moon because he might say something undignified or silly when he stepped off the ladder. With Neil Armstrong, you could guarantee his first words would be something poignant and fitting.
WADR to Col. Aldrin, why not him when Bill Anders (fresh off Apollo 8 sans his LM) was ready and had trained with Armstrong, establishing a rapport already?
Politics, they wanted a civilian to emphasize the "non-military" conquest of space which was re-enforced by Neil's words "We came in peace for all mankind"... Which are written on the plaque fixed to the LM leg...
Quote from: Rocket Science on 10/11/2017 07:20 pmPolitics, they wanted a civilian to emphasize the "non-military" conquest of space which was re-enforced by Neil's words "We came in peace for all mankind"... Which are written on the plaque fixed to the LM leg...Naw... if LM-3 had been ready to fly in December, 1968, and the remaining alphabet-soup of missions had been flown as originally planned, Pete Conrad and Al Bean would have been the first humans to land on the Moon.Deke set up the rotation in late 1967 such that one of three crews -- Stafford's, Conrad's or Armstrong's -- would get the first shot at the landing. I don't think he truly cared which one got the first shot at it. He just wanted one of those three crews to be The Crew. Of those three crews, the only guy who had not actually flown in Gemini was Al Bean, but Beano had been a backup CDR in Gemini, so Deke was OK with him on one of the crews he, AIUI, thought of as being "the guys I was aiming at the first landings". And Conrad *really* wanted Bean, once C.C. Williams died and had to be replaced.Conrad, knowing that the first landing attempt would most likely come on Apollo 11 (it was penciled in as the G mission as early as late 1967), was delighted to have been the backup CDR of McDivitt's Apollo 8 -- per Deke's rotation, he would skip two flights and then been the prime CDR of Apollo 11. And was really ticked off (to use the most polite language I can for it) when Borman agreed to swap places with McDivitt, making Conrad the backup CDR of Apollo 9, in line to command Apollo 12.Neil Armstrong and his crew ended up getting Apollo 11 only because LM-3 wasn't ready to fly in 1968, George Low had a bright idea, and the D and E mission crews, right along with their back-ups, swapped places...
Had LM-3 been ready in 1968 and the LEM test flight occurred then, what would Apollo 9 with McDivitt's crew have been?Orbit the Moon? I was always under the impression that unless there was a LEM along, to use its engine as a backup, there would be no orbit.
"Crew rotation fits for me. There was no guarantee Apollo 11 would land so 12 and 13 could be set up for tries before the end of 1969 (even though the end of the decade was 1970)."Off topic, but the comment on end of the decade depends on how the decade is defined (and Kennedy did not define it, leading to the ambiguity). So much hot air is vented over this that it does bear some clarification before Antarctica melts entirely.
The program probably was rushed more than it should have; the Apollo 1 fire might have been avoided in that case and more could have been accomplished on some of the missions. NASA's original timetables for Apollo envisioned a much more leisurely pace with a manned lunar landing some time in the 1970s.