Documents / Document
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 12-22 to share documentation? A reluctance on the part of the astronaut management to let flight controllers have access to checklists, things like that, or was that pretty well smoothed over and working when you got involved in it? MCDIVITT: It’s an interesting question. I—when you say the Astronaut Office, that implies that there’s this homogeneous, uniform opinion which never existed. It may today, but I don’t know. It never existed then. So, there was always disagreement amongst the astronauts about what the relationship with the flight controller ought to be. I got along with them great! And I would share anything with them. It didn’t make any difference what they wanted. I mean, I didn’t have any secrets. And so, I never had a problem like that. But some of the guys—some of the astronauts didn’t get along that well with them! WARD: Do you think— MCDIVITT: And some of the astronauts didn’t get along that well with the contractors, because they were, I thought, overbearing, demanding, idiotic, unreasonable, and I mean, that didn’t contribute anything to anybody whatsoever. WARD: So, in your view, that would have been more of an individual difference with commanders than it was a policy? MCDIVITT: An individual relationship, yes. My crews always got along great with them. As a matter of fact, I always looked at it as sort of a flight team, whether it was Flight Operations Directorate or Flight Crew Directorate, or whatever we called them in those days. It was sort of a flight team.
Document, cited by the archive. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is above. 110 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.