Apollo 2 and 3: There were no craft named Apollo 2 or 3. Apparently after the Apollo-1 craft was destroyed during a pre-flight test at Cape Canaveral, the first few mission (through Apollo-6) were unmanned missions to test various aspects of the Apollo program - Launch vehicle, CSM, LM, and their inter-play.
Two Apollo missions were failures: a 1967 cabin fire killed the entire Apollo 1 crew during a ground test in preparation for what was to be the first crewed flight; and the third landing attempt on Apollo 13 was aborted by an oxygen tank explosion en route to the Moon, which disabled the CSM Odyssey's electrical power ...
So what happened? The standard answer is that the last three Apollo missions were cancelled for budgetary reasons. That's NASA's official position: There were originally 3 more Apollo missions scheduled to fly to the Moon in the initial Apollo plan, all were cancelled due to budgetary constraints.
On September 11, 1967, numbering of the Apollo missions began with the fourth subsequent uncrewed test flight, Apollo 4. Apollo 5 and 6 were also uncrewed flights. There was no Apollo 2 or 3.
There was no actual Apollo 2 or 3, but there was a series of tests with a different numbering system. Apollos 4, 5, and 6 were non-crewed tests of the nearly complete system with actual modules of the Apollo spacecraft as it was meant to be flown.
Apollo 2 and 3: There were no craft named Apollo 2 or 3. Apparently after the Apollo-1 craft was destroyed during a pre-flight test at Cape Canaveral, the first few mission (through Apollo-6) were unmanned missions to test various aspects of the Apollo program - Launch vehicle, CSM, LM, and their inter-play.
Apollo 13 was NASA's third moon-landing mission, but the astronauts never made it to the lunar surface. During the mission's dramatic series of events, an oxygen tank explosion almost 56 hours into the flight forced the crew to abandon all thoughts of reaching the moon.
The command module of Apollo 13 entered Earth's atmosphere and splashed down on target on April 17 at 1:07 PM Eastern Standard Time. The mission has been referred to as a successful failure, in that all the crew members survived a catastrophic accident.
As of April 2023, all three Apollo 8 astronauts remain alive.
The mission never flew; a cabin fire during a launch rehearsal test at Cape Kennedy Air Force Station Launch Complex 34 on January 27 killed all three crew members—Command Pilot Gus Grissom, Senior Pilot Ed White, and Pilot Roger B. Chaffee—and destroyed the command module (CM).
Lunar lander and rover; first Chinese lunar landing, landed in Mare Imbrium with Yutu 1. Relay satellite located at the Earth-Moon L2 point in order to allow communications with Chang'e 4. Lunar lander and rover; first soft landing on the Far side of the Moon, landed in Von Karman crater with Yutu-2.
Although the historic Apollo 11 mission's three astronauts made it home safe, a once-classified anomaly almost killed them. The problem occurred during Apollo 11's return to Earth. It caused a discarded space module to nearly crash into the crew's capsule.
With the world anxiously watching, Apollo 13, a U.S. lunar spacecraft that suffered a severe malfunction on its journey to the moon, safely returns to Earth on April 17, 1970.
The Apollo 13 malfunction was caused by an explosion and rupture of oxygen tank no. 2 in the service module. The explosion ruptured a line or damaged a valve in the no. 1 oxygen tank, causing it to lose oxygen rapidly.
The demise was triggered when, in April 1970, an oxygen tank exploded two days after the launch of the Apollo 13 mission, threatening the lives of the astronauts on board. Missions after Apollo 17 were cancelled.
Not long after Gemini 12 splashed down on November 15, 1966, George Mueller of the Office of Manned Spaceflight cancelled Apollo 2.
Altogether, Apollo 12 spent 3.7 days in lunar orbit, circling the Moon 45 times. The crew returned safely to Earth on November 24, 1969 after a flight of 10 days and 4 hours.
Apollo 7, with astronauts Walter M. Schirra, Jr., Donn F. Eisele, and R. Walter Cunningham aboard, splashed down on October 22, 1968, ending a highly successful engineering test flight.
The successful Apollo 9 mission, the most complex crewed space mission flown to that time, brought the Moon landing one step closer. The next step tested the LM in lunar orbit – while Apollo 9 was in orbit, NASA rolled out the Saturn V rocket for that mission, Apollo 10, planned to fly in May.
To help astronauts survive the forbidding environment of space, the Apollo spacecraft were designed with many safety features. The command and lunar modules protected the astronauts against such hazards as cosmic radiation, extremes of heat and cold, and micro-meteoroids.
The TLI placed Apollo on a "free-return trajectory" - often illustrated as a figure of eight shape. This course would have harnessed the power of the Moon's gravity to propel the spacecraft back to Earth without the need for more rocket fuel.
Update: A typical Apollo blackout lasted about 4 minutes. Due to a shallower re-entry path, Apollo 13's blackout was calculated to last about 4.5 minutes. Flight director Gene Kranz's logs show that it took about 6 minutes to re-establish contact with Apollo 13.
On Jan. 27, 1967, a fire swept through the Apollo 1 Command Module during a launch rehearsal test, tragically killing the three astronauts trapped inside. Astronauts Gus Grissom (left), Ed White (middle), and Roger Chaffee (right), died on Jan.
On July 20, 1969, the Apollo 11 crew successfully completed the national goal set by President John F. Kennedy eight years prior: to perform a crewed lunar landing and return to Earth.
The Apollo 13 mission was to be the third lunar landing in the program before an on board explosion forced the mission to circle the Moon without landing. This is the insignia of the Apollo 13 lunar landing mission.