In article ,
Explorer8939 wrote:
I am having a hard time finding any long duration Apollo CSM flights
prior to October 1968. There were 2 short orbital tests on the Saturn
V, but it appears that all Saturn IB flights were sub orbital.

Correct.

I am surprised that NASA did not schedule a full dress rehearsal of Apollo
7 on orbit in the summer of 1968.

My reading of the tea leaves is that there wasn't any urgent reason to.
The short-duration tests established that the thing basically worked,
there wasn't any reason to expect deterioration while in orbit that would
make an emergency return impossible, and so long as a return was always
possible, it was better to test with a crew on board.

Setting an Apollo CSM up for unmanned operation required significant
modifications, and there was always some nagging concern that this wasn't
quite a realistic test of the manned spacecraft. The modifications would
have gotten more elaborate for a long-duration test, increasing the
doubts. After the fire, Apollo made a real point of concentrating major
engineering effort on the final configuration of the hardware, and not
putting a lot of time and work into dead-end test versions.
--
"Think outside the box -- the box isn't our friend." | Henry Spencer
-- George Herbert |