On 21/09/2012 18:14, Jan Philips wrote:
On Fri, 21 Sep 2012 09:04:30 +0100, Brian Lawrence
wrote:

Possibly, but it would have been a very different program and it might
have been impossible to meet the 'end of this decade' deadline.

But none of group 5 flew until A13.

It is well documented that, for example, Slayton was planning to
transfer White, Chaffee, Eisele & Cunningham to AAP after 'Apollo 1'.
He did assign Bean to AAP before needing him for Apollo 12. He had
'no plans' for Cooper after Gemini 5.

Cooper was to be the commander of A14 until he got bumped for Shepard.

No he wasn't. At least not in the minds of Slayton, Shepard and NASA
bosses.

Eighteen
was barely enough - we see that Slayton was obliged to bring Cooper
back to serve as backup commander for Apollo 10 for example.

You are right.

And if Deke hadn't been short of candidates as b/u CDR for 10, Gordo
would never have been talked of as a potential CDR for 13. Having been
given the chance to impress as b/u CDR on 10, he failed to do so.

To illustrate the point about Cooper being a 'last resort' to backup 10.
The crews for 10 began training on Dec 02 1968, shortly before Apollo
8 flew. Commanders in training we

AS08 Borman Armstrong (b/u)
AS09 McDivitt Conrad (b/u)
AS10 Stafford Cooper (b/u)

Apart from Cooper all were from G2, there were no G1 guys left (Schirra
was retiring after AS07, Shepard & Slayton were still grounded). There
were two remaining G2 astronauts (Lovell & Young) both of whom were
assigned as CMPs (Lovell to AS08 & Young to AS10). At that time no G3
astronaut was qualified to be an Apollo CDR, and only four ever did
qualify (Scott, Cernan, Collins & Gordon), all four were in the above
crews too. Al Bean got to command an Apollo in Skylab and he was on
Conrad's crew above.

Luckily for Slayton, his buddy, Al Shepard, had undergone surgery in
May 1968 and was cleared to return to flight status in March 1969,
some six months before what became the Apollo 14 crew started training.

Before the fire several G5 astronauts were assigned as support crew
for the first three manned Apollos. Without them, even at the stage,
the workload on the prime and backup crews would have been even heavier.

It was always anticipated that astronauts would leave the program so
planning required the addition of group 5.

But I wonder if some vetrans left because there were so many "new
guys" waiting to go, that they thought it would be a long time before
they got another flight (if ever).

Yes, although really only those who flew before Apollo 11. Some were
'pensioned off' to Skylab (Cunningham, Schweickhart), One (Anders) was
offered a CMP flight, but having trained as LMP wanted to fly the LM.
McDivitt was sort of offered the LMP position on Shepard's crew but
having flown two missions as CDR wasn't exactly keen. Stafford took
over Shepard's role, before coming back for ASTP. Borman and Collins
had had enough and wanted to retire anyway.

--

Brian W Lawrence
Wantage
Oxfordshire