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This is a NASA Johnson Space Center Oral History Project transcript of astronaut James A. McDivitt, interviewed by Doug Ward at Elk Lake, Michigan, on 29 June 1999. McDivitt talks about flying F-86s in Korea, test pilot work at Edwards, and his first class at the Aerospace Research Pilot School. He also covers turning down Dyna-soar, joining NASA in 1962 and learning to be an Apollo Program Manager. He describes the Change Board and says decisions were not second-guessed.
“Nevers”36 pages
Johnson Space Center Oral History Project James A. McDivitt 29 June 1999 12-103 the Program Office, and finally got to the Program Manager. So, everybody was sort of a self-contained thing. When we got into Apollo, it was so gigantic that we would have had half the world in the Program Office, and there was really no way to manage anything like that. And a guy named Jim Elks, I believe, came into NASA from someplace, I have no idea where, and he put in the matrix management system and really a different concept on how to manage things. And so, we had an Apollo Program Office that wasn’t really any different in size than the Gemini Program Office; but we “matrixed” with all the people. And so that, almost the entire Engineering and Development Directorate at the Manned Spacecraft Center worked on Apollo. But they reported—they were broken down into small groups; like maybe the reaction, the attitude control rockets. The guys who did that, who looked after that little rocket, were in Engineering and Development. And when that sort of came together at a little higher level, we had a guy in the Program Office who sort of supervised that group of people in Engineering and Development. The people in there reported or worked for Max Faget. But their product was my product. And it came to me through a group of Subsystem Managers, then it went to a System Manager, who then went to the Program Manager. And so, at one time I think we had 600,000 people working on the program, counting all the contractors and things like that. To make that manageable, of course, we had to have a number of layers of management. And so, within NASA we had this matrix management system. And for me, from the top, I had a Deputy Program Manager for Experiments, I did that job myself quite a lot, I had a Deputy Program Manager for the Lunar Module, a Deputy Program Manager for the Command Module, and then I had a Systems Engineering Office. And in the Systems Engineering Office people provided technical assistant across these Program Offices. But in
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