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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.
Johnson Space Center Oral History Project James A. McDivitt 29 June 1999 12-23 WARD: That was one of the things we were talking about earlier, of how that team came together and coalesced, really seemed to have gotten itself on the right track by the time we got into Apollo. And the impression that it may have formed up in Gemini. And I think you said that really this was taken care of before the Gemini Program got rolling. McDivitt: Yeah. Yeah. I think there were really a couple of milestones along the way. One was the fight for the design of the spacecraft early on in Mercury. Was it going to be—was it always going to be flown by monkeys? Or were we actually going to have somebody with a brain, that had rational powers, that had some experience in flying things, and was that— were they going to utilize that to make the whole thing better? I think the Mercury guys fought that battle very well, and we ended up with a concept that a lot of us, I think in the end—to design spacecraft that were much more flexible than anything the Russians ever put up. Because they were more automated and ours were more manually operated. We had automation, but we had a lot of manual backups though. So, I think that that decision pointed back early in the Mercury days was absolutely essential. Then we get around to flying, I think the cooperation between the guys on the ground and the guys in space was probably advanced more by Gemini, because you could do different things with Gemini and—things like a rendezvous and the EVAs [Extravehicular Activity] and all that kind of stuff. Maneuvering the spacecraft around. That really took people on both ends of the string to take care of the problem. So, I think that operational stuff really came under Gemini. And that’s why I said earlier that if—I don’t think we could’ve done Apollo. I mean, Apollo could—would’ve been a 30-flight program with a lot of accidents if we started going to the Moon very early because if we didn’t have the coordination skills and the reliability of the acceptance of the reliability of the ground or the
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