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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.
“Mission Control”9 pages
Johnson Space Center Oral History Project James A. McDivitt 29 June 1999 12-16 [Jr.] and Neil [A.] Armstrong, because we’d get really good treatment when we got to a military base! WARD: I guess that the civilian emphasis was really a top-level political decision at the time, and— MCDIVITT: Absolutely. The reason for that was that we had tracking stations all around the world in foreign countries, and if this thing had any—smacked at all of military then there would be political repercussions—or there could be political repercussions in each of those countries. Every one of them had a different political situation, and if it looked like these countries were supporting an American military operation, then there could be a lot of problems, either domestically or with some of their foreign relations. So, this was strictly a civilian project. WARD: This next question may get into what [Benjamin] Disraeli called “lies, damned lies, and statistics.” But one of the things that stands out, and the kind of—stands out in my recollection, very unscientifically, is that early on in the astronaut program, space program, there seemed to be an inordinate number of training accidents and fatalities among the astronaut corps. You lost one out of the first group; two of your group of nine; four out of the next group. MCDIVITT: Yeah, we lost a lot of people. I think there may even have been more. Yeah, because Gus got killed in that—and Elliot See was killed in an airplane accident. Ed White was killed in that spacecraft fire. WARD: Yeah. There was a lot of attrition.
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