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.
Johnson Space Center Oral History Project James A. McDivitt 29 June 1999 12-25 being broken was one on my flight, and Chris [Christopher C.] Kraft [Jr.] did that, and it could’ve had some serious effects. But we had a back—if this failed, then we were going to do this. And if this failed, we were going to do this. And on Gemini IV, we lost a computer; and the Mission Rule said that we would fly a 90-degree bank, a 90-degree bank, a 90-degree bank, a 90-degree bank, a 90-degree bank [gestures] to make it a zero lift reentry. When the computer failed in flight, Chris wanted to do a rolling reentry like they had done in Mercury. And we were up in space, and there was nothing wrong with the other concept. But he wanted to do that. Well, it wasn’t real—there wasn’t any time to argue over that. So, we did the rolling reentry. Unfortunately, the instrumentation of the spacecraft only went to 20 degrees per second roll rate, and that’s where it stopped. And we were—and the thing that he ad hoc’ed up was a 20-degree roll rate reentry. Well, you couldn’t tell whether you were going 20 degrees per second or 30 or 40 or 50. We had a broken thruster, which wound us up to probably 200 or 300 degrees per second on the way down. And while I could tell that we were going a little faster than 20 degrees per second, I couldn’t tell what it was. Didn’t have any instrumentation. It turned out that nothing really bad happened out of it, but it just went to show you that you really shouldn’t change the Rules in flight. WARD: Of course the whole purpose of Mission Rules, as I recall them, was to try to second- guess, to anticipate the kinds of things that can happen to you. The kinds of system failures you can get. And to apply the calm group thinking that you can do before a mission to help you make— MCDIVITT: That’s right. Yeah. Absolutely. And in a way, it was like a—there was a thing called failure modes and effects analysis that you do with hardware. If this fails, how will it
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.