“Nevers”36 pages
- p. 1 …the Air Force—I’d
never been in an airplane. Never been off the ground. I…
- p. 3 …Having never been in
an airplane and no idea what it was all about, and I…
- p. 7 …was that the Dyna-
soar Program would never fly. The spacecraft was wrong. They were trying…
- p. 8 …You know, it was a lifting
body concept and the landing thing, but it never flew…
- p. 10 …I wanted you to know that I realize that I should never have threatened you like…
- p. 14 …As soon as we got selected, we were told that, “No more uniforms.” We were never…
- p. 19 …T-38s never had much fuel, and you
- p. 20 …And some—you
know, we didn’t have everything available in the spacecraft, so never was…
- p. 22 …It never existed then. So, there was always disagreement amongst the
astronauts about what the relationship…
- p. 28 …So, there’s
always the thought that, well, maybe he was never going to come around…
- p. 33 …We’d never had a flight longer than 30 hours, or
whatever it was, that Gordo…
- p. 38 …You know, he
never got sick flying airplanes and the crazy motions that we did. And…
- p. 39 …I mean, we would’ve never
gotten to the Moon when we did if we’d…
- p. 40 …He never got
involved in the mission, because the one in the Mission Control Center in…
- p. 43 …Fortunately, we never had to try that!
WARD: Do you think the nature of the ejection…
- p. 45 …And I never did see it again.
- p. 46 …I never did see it until years and years later, when I started getting all
these…
- p. 49 …So, you never see more than one light, or hardly ever see more than one light…
- p. 50 …were able to overcome these problems
and never get down to where we were on our…
- p. 54 …and backup crews did except they were never going to fly. So, they helped us test…
- p. 57 …And some of the North American people maintain to this
day that they were never told…
- p. 59 …And then I never
dealt with him again; and finally he got fired. So, I don…
- p. 64 …We never did find them. You know, we never knew exactly what caused the fire;
so…
- p. 65 …It’s just impossible!” We were never going to get the weight on the lunar module…
- p. 69 …Throttled the engine up
and down through regimes it probably was never throttled at when it…
- p. 74 …Well, that was never my attitude. That was never my attitude. As
a matter of fact…
- p. 83 …It never occurred except for the fire, but I
know I personally expected a lot of…
- p. 85 …I threw him out of my
office and I said, “You are never, ever to come…
- p. 86 …I ran
the Apollo Spacecraft Program I never had a problem with money. We were always…
- p. 87 …And I’d never played baseball in my life!
- p. 91 …I thought that we should never interfere in any way with
the flight crews on a…
- p. 94 …And I think that we would’ve never had an Apollo Program if Rocco hadn’t…
- p. 99 …I never did get my Major’s on my shoulders. He called
Ed up, promoted Ed…
- p. 105 …said who was recommending it but they never said who was
opposed to it. So, we…
- p. 108 …He never second-guessed me. He had a boss. The
Associate Administrator for Manned Spaceflight and…
- p. 109 …And fortunately, my bosses were
such that they never second-guessed what I did. They just…
Johnson Space Center Oral History Project James A. McDivitt
29 June 1999 12-11
MCDIVITT: Yeah.
WARD: And you really became kind of the core, as you look back on it—the management
core, the leadership core of the Apollo Program. And also, a lot of the leadership and
command responsibilities for Gemini. Did you have much involvement with Mercury at that
time? Or was it pretty much straight into Gemini and Apollo?
MCDIVITT: Oh no. See, when we got there the—by the time we got to NASA, it was around
the 1st of October of ’62. [Alan B.] Shepard [Jr.] , [Virgil I. “Gus”] Grissom, [John H.]
Glenn [Jr.] , [M. Scott] Carpenter had already flown. And we got there early in October. We
were told we were going to have like a month to sort of get settled in. But the second day we
were there, I think, we were told we were going to leave for the Cape [Canaveral, Florida]
that night for [Walter M.] Schirra’s [Jr.] flight. So, we went out down there and we watched
it. But we didn’t really contribute anything to it. And then, when [L. Gordon] Cooper [Jr.]
flew, we went down about three or four weeks before the flight and just watched the
countdowns but we didn’t—we made no contribution whatsoever. As a matter of fact, we
were probably in everybody’s way. But at any rate, we were down there on a learning
experience to see what it was like before the flight.
WARD: And of course, Cooper’s was the last of the Mercury flights.
MCDIVITT: It was the last of the Mercury Seven.
WARD: So, you focused very early on, on Gemini and, I presume, Apollo.
MCDIVITT: Yeah, yeah. Well, when we got there, we were all—the nine of us were assigned