James A. McDivitt oral history (Doug Ward)

Johnson Space Center Oral History Project James A. McDivitt
29 June 1999 12-106
WARD: Would it be correct to say that the Change Board was a mechanism that allowed the
Program Manager to assure that important details didn’t slip by unnoticed, but that the
Program at the same time didn’t get bogged down by things that were less important?
MCDIVITT: Absolutely. The Deputy Program Managers took care of every detail. They
were very—Owen Morris and Aaron Cohen are detail nuts. And they took care of all that
little stuff. I had total confidence in them that nothing would slip by. But at the same token,
I just couldn’t release the program to everybody making changes that weren’t coordinated.
So, we had this other super board that took care of the meatier things. And I always had
confidence that everything was there.
Now you asked another question about, how did I get to be—how did I make that
transition from astronaut to Program Manager.
WARD: Yeah.
MCDIVITT: Well, I’ve always been interested in business; and when I first got assigned to
NASA I was busy just learning what space was. But then when I got assigned to the Gemini
flight crew, I used to go up to all the program reviews at McDonnell. This wasn’t an
astronaut job. I’d go up there and sit in on the discussions, review the contracts, see what the
schedules were, how they were changing. Sit in on a lot of the manufacturing scheduling
stuff. And even worked with them when they did the first incentive contract. We had a
great, big three-dimensional model of performance versus dollars versus schedule. And so, I
spent a lot of time doing that.
Then when I took over my—the astronaut job of looking after Apollo, I spent a
tremendous amount of time working with the contractors and working with the Program