LAST EDITED ON Jul-09-08 AT 11:11 AM (EDT)
 
>AH. What you smell is Wedge Rats pulling off Operation Hero, Jim.

Sort of. Operation Unfinished Business was a sort of evolutionary offshoot of Project Hero. PH was specifically a recruitment campaign. The idea for OUB came after the first few Hero extractions came off without any cities getting destroyed and confidence in the Earth infiltration/exfiltration techniques improved. There were a few people who, for various reasons, weren't considered likely recruitment candidates, but for whom the founders wanted to do something nice if they could arrange it.

Included on that list were the people involved with the early space program who hoped for a shot at the Moon but, for various reasons, didn't get to go. That included the prospective crews of the three canceled Apollo missions, the guys who only went there as command module pilots and didn't get to land, the crew of Apollo 8, Tom Stafford from Apollo 10, cosmonaut Alexei Leonov (who would've been the USSR's first man on the Moon if their program had worked) - and, naturally, the surviving crew of Apollo 13.

As Lovell's phone call at the end implies, Fred Haise was also on the list, and indeed was near the top, because he was denied not once but twice, once on Apollo 13, the second time when Apollo 19 was canceled. We'd had a hard time tracking him down, though. The original plan was to get them all together and do one trip, but the logistics simply didn't work out. Shame, because it probably would have been a hoot. We did manage a mass outing for the Project Apollo Moonwalkers' Reunion, though (less Jim Irwin, who unfortunately had died in 1991), and that was fun.

We did recruit two people during Operation Unfinished Business, but in both cases they asked us: astronaut L. Gordon Cooper and cosmonaut Tatyana Kuznetsova (the latter of whom thus became the first interstellar Russian).

--G.
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Admin
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
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