selected as a member of the second group of astronauts in 1962, he was command pilot of Gemini 4 (1965). Scott, also Air Force, was selected in the third astronaut group in 1963 and flew alongside Neil Armstrong in Gemini 8, on which the first spacecraft docking was performed. Schweickart, a civilian who had served in the Air Force and Massachusetts Air National Guard, was selected as a Group3 astronaut but was not assigned to a Gemini mission and had no spaceflight experience. The backup crew consisted of Pete Conrad as commander, Command Module Pilot Richard F. Gordon Jr., and Lunar Module Pilot Alan L. Bean. This crew flew as prime on Apollo 12 in November 1969. The support crew for Apollo9 consisted of Stuart A. Roosa, Jack R. Lousma, Edgar D. Mitchell and Alfred M. Worden. Lousma was not an original member of the Apollo9 support crew, but was assigned after Fred W. Haise Jr. was moved to the position of backup lunar module pilot on Apollo 8—several astronauts were shifted in the wake of Michael Collins being removed from the Apollo8 prime crew because of treatment for bone spurs. The flight directors were Gene Kranz, first shift, Gerry Griffin, second shift and Pete Frank, third shift. Capsule communicators were Conrad, Gordon, Bean, Worden, Roosa and Ronald Evans. Mission insignia The circular patch shows a drawing of a Saturn V rocket with the letters USA on it. To its right, an Apollo CSM is shown next to a LM, with the CSM's nose pointed at the "front door" of the LM rather than at its top docking port. The CSM is trailing rocket fire in a circle. The crew's names are along the top edge of the circle, with APOLLO IX at the bottom. The "D" in McDivitt's name is filled with red to mark that this was the "Dmission" in the alphabetic sequence of Apollo missions. The patch was designed by Allen Stevens of Rockwell International. Planning and training Apollo 9's main purpose was to qualify the LM for crewed lunar flight, demonstrating, among other things, that it could perform the maneuvers in space that would be needed for a lunar landing, including docking with the CSM. Colin Burgess and Francis French, in their book about the Apollo Program, deemed McDivitt's crew among the best trained ever—they had worked together since January 1966, at first as backups for