Your Apollo 11 crew selection

In his autobiography, Deke specifically addressed suggestions that he didn't think much of Bean, pointing out that Bean was the first of his group to be assigned to a command position (namely backup commander of Gemini 10). I forget what else he had to say on the subject. I suggest finding a copy of it. It's a good read.

Cernan is entitled to his opinions about Aldrin, Schweickhart, and Cunningham. Some people just don't mesh well together. I'd point out that he never worked with the latter two on a crew and perhaps did not really have an opportunity to get to know them well. Schweikhart says he made a bad impression on Gus Grissom early on, but that two came to a better understanding later on when they worked together. In his own book, Cernan recalls how dubious he was when Joe Engle was dropped from his crew in favor of Jack Schmitt, a scientist. Nevertheless he tells how well they ultimately worked together on the mission, and that in fact their different personalities complimented each other when exploring the moon, far more than Engle, who personality was closer to Cernan's would have.

The unfortunate fact is both Schweikhart and Cunningham, after waiting so long for missions, both ended up with albatross around their necks which ensured they'd almost certiainly never fly in space again (which they haven't).

I've read that, to his credit, Cunningham wasn't nearly as combative with the ground crews as his Apollo 7 crewmates were, and tried to stay out of the fray, but paid the price nonetheless.

Schweickhart's space sickness is what effectively grounded him. Other astronauts, of course, got sick in space, including Borman on Apollo 8, but tended to downplay this, whereas Schweickhart was candid about happened and even volunteered for medical tests to help learn more about what happened. In the book "In the Shadow of the Moon" (no relation to the documentary), he expresses anger at Borman for downplaying his own sickness for the sake of the "macho astronaut" image, when perhaps more could have been learned if he'd been more forthcoming.

From what I heard, there was some talk of replacing Aldrin with Lovell, but Arsmtrong dismissed that pretty quickly.

As for Collins and Aldrin, as I pointed out, Collins area of work had always been the command module (as oppose to someone like Fred Haise, who had worked on the Lunar Module and was a natural choice for to be an LMP). As I said, it would have been a huge waste of experience to take him out of a craft he was quite familiar with and put him in a craft he was far less familiar with. Collins, for his part, always stressed that going "99% of the way" was good enough for him.

The truth is, if Collins wanted to walk on the moon badly enough, he could have stayed in rotation and would have had a very good shot at Apollo 17. If you strictly follow the rotation pattern, Collins would have been Al Shepard's backup on Apollo 14, then commanded Apollo 17. But Collins was reportedly tired of the grind of being an astronaut (he even reportedly developed a facial twitch from the stress of training for Apollo 11), not to mention the time away from his family. Aldrin also mentions in his book "Magnificent Desolation" that all three Apollo 11 crewmen decided it would selfish to go back into the crew rotation after such a historic mission.

It's a sort of sad counterpoint that some of the astronauts who also orbited the moon but really DID want to walk on it (specifically Bill Anders and Dick Gordon) never got that chance.

I can't speak of bias in favor of Naval officers over Air Force ones, but it's worth noting that Apollo 15, the only all-Air Force Apollo crew on the moon (Apollo 9 was also composed of current or former Air Force guys)were left with a rather bad reputation because of the stamp incident. Not only did destroy their astronaut careers, but it likely ensured Dave Scott would never make General. For his part, Scott says other crews did similar things, but never got caught.