Canceled Apollo missions
[1] In September 1962, NASA planned to make four crewed low-Earth-orbital test flights of partially equipped Block I Command/Service Modules (CSM) using the Saturn I launch vehicle, designated SA-11 through SA-14, in 1965 and 1966.
Therefore, NASA canceled these flights in October 1963,[2] and replaced them with two crewed Saturn IB missions, designated AS-204 and AS-205.
They immediately began their training in the first Block II Command Module CM-101, as Grissom's crew were preparing for a February 1967 launch.
Then, on January 27, 1967, Grissom, White, and Chaffee were killed in a flash fire in their spacecraft cabin during a test on the launch pad, interrupting the program for 19 months to identify and fix the root causes of numerous safety problems.
George Low, the manager of the Apollo Spacecraft Program Office, proposed a solution in August 1968.
There were also concerns from the Central Intelligence Agency that the Soviet Union was planning their own circumlunar flight for December to upstage the Americans once again (see Zond program).
The following landing sites were chosen (see clarification below) for these missions, planned to occur at intervals of approximately four months through July 1972.
The ASSB would have selected actual sites for the cancelled Apollo missions, and since these missions never went through the site selection process, the list presented here did not reflect actual planning of the Apollo Program Office or NASA HQ.
[9] After NASA Deputy Administrator George M. Low announced that the final three Moon landings were rescheduled for 1973 and 1974, following the three planned Skylab missions,[10] Chief Astronaut Deke Slayton moved Lind to Apollo Applications, stating that "with the cancellation of 20, I could see I just wasn't going to have a flight for him".
Skylab was postponed to 1973, and the final landing schedule became: At the time, 35 of NASA's 49 active astronauts were waiting for a mission.
Schmitt's ambitious proposal included the launch into lunar orbit of special communications satellites based on the existing TIROS satellites to allow contact with the astronauts during their powered descent and lunar surface operations.
In August 1971, President Richard Nixon proposed to cancel all remaining lunar landings (Apollo 16 and 17).
His Office of Management and Budget Deputy Director Caspar Weinberger was opposed to this and persuaded Nixon to keep the remaining Moon missions, but recommended that if such cancellation did happen, it should be "on the ground that Apollo 15 was so successful in gathering needed data that we can now shift, sooner than previously expected, to the Space Shuttle, Grand Tour, NERVA, etc".
He did not intend to give astronauts two lunar landing commands but, according to historian Michael Cassutt, as late as the summer of 1969—when 10 landings were still scheduled—Slayton planned to give Lunar Module pilots Fred Haise, Edgar Mitchell, and James Irwin the opportunity to walk again on the Moon as commanders.
[15] During the early Apollo missions he used a rotation system of assigning a crew as backup and then, three missions later, as the prime crew; however, by the later Apollo flights, this system was used less frequently as astronauts left the program, Slayton wanted to give rookies a chance, and astronauts did not want to take backup positions that no longer could lead to prime-crew spots.
During Skylab 3, a malfunction on the Apollo CSM docked to the station caused fears that the crew would not be able to return safely.
[20] Likewise, the canceled flights' CSMs and LMs went either unused or were used for other missions: This article incorporates public domain material from websites or documents of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.
