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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.
“Edwards Air Force Base”3 pages
Johnson Space Center Oral History Project James A. McDivitt 29 June 1999 12-108 necessarily be a good Program Manager. WARD: …Jim, one of the things that managers face is that you have to make a lot of decisions. And you have to have a lot of confidence in your decision-making ability. How did you handle that? And how did you keep from having your—the decisions you made second-guessed and turned around? MCDIVITT: Well, I think one of the things that made NASA so successful back in the ’60s, early ’70s was the fact that I think we all knew where the buck stopped and which part of the buck that you owned. And I think that there’s a lot to be learned from those old days. Because when I made a decision that had to do with a spacecraft and its hardware, I had a boss. The Program Director. He never second-guessed me. He had a boss. The Associate Administrator for Manned Spaceflight and the NASA Administrator. They never second-guessed him. And I think that there was no way that we could have ever done the things that we did, in real time, with somebody making a decision and then as it came—as you made the decision, somebody getting you to justify it and review it. And then somebody above them asking to do the same thing. It just wouldn’t work. One of the things that I learned when we were flying was that there’s this thing called real-time engineering. And when you’re on to launch, it’s ten minutes and then you’re there. And then you do the translunar, and it’s three days until we get there. Or if you’re in lunar orbit, it’s an hour in the front and an hour in back. And you’ve got to make those decisions within those timeframes. In fact, I remember a lot of times we had 2 hours and 31 minutes to make this decision, you know. And at that time, you’ve got to make the decision. And you need as much data as you can. So, when you got to 2 hours and 20 minutes, somebody had to make
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