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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 12-109 the decision. And if it was my decision to make, I made it. And fortunately, my bosses were such that they never second-guessed what I did. They just said, “Okay. That’s the decision. That’s what we’re going to do.” And I think you have to be very, very careful that you don’t get yourself into things like the Challenger accident, where everybody’s second-guessing every damn decision that anybody made along the line. It’s easy to go back and say, “Oh yeah,” you know, “If I’d have done that, I’d have done it this way.” There are going to be losses in this business, and you’ve got to give the guys who are making the decision the support they need. WARD: Yeah. Of course, you also have to have a pretty good batting average on those decisions to keep having people trust you. So— MCDIVITT: Oh yeah. And having even batted once. But things go wrong in space that you don’t know anything about. WARD: Yeah. Do you think there’s an intuitive aspect to decision-making? That good decision-makers are the ones who trust their intuition, but who have pretty good— MCDIVITT: No, I don’t think so. I don’t think this is an intuition thing. I think we did all of our decision-making on the best engineering facts we could get. So, sometimes we couldn’t get as good as you wanted. And then maybe you had to apply a little intuition there. But you had to get as much as you could. For instance, when we had the oscillating actuator. The only thing we could do was pick up quickly two or three tests that we could ask the guy in the spacecraft to do, and then he was back behind the Moon again. Then we had to do something on the ground to see if
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