“Bill Anders was the LM pilot on the Apollo mission that didn’t actually have a lunar lander. Tourist. (Sarcasm)”
Passenger...
But Apollo 8 was a ballsy mission without a backup LEM engine to escape the luner gravitational pull, in case the service module engine failed to ignite.
Yeah, I take nothing away from those guys. Apollo 7 had a lot of problems between Wally Sciarra and mission control owing, I think, to Wally’s lack of faith in the Apollo spacecraft. The LM is way behind schedule putting the targeted landing in 1969 in jeopardy. So here you take a still unproven command & service module & launch it around the moon? Big brass ones in mission planning!