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 12-26 affect this? And if it causes that to fail, then how will that failure affect this? And when you find that you have a problem in the hardware, then you go back and redesign the hardware. And the Mission Rules were sort of the same thing applied to the operations, where if you had a hardware problem, how would it affect the mission? And then if the mission—what you’re going to do then or what you’re going to be able to do is going to affect something else dramatically, then you needed to have another concept on how you’re going to get there. Yeah, I thought they were really good things. And I think that helped to bring the flight crews and the ground crew guys together. Because those were the two groups of people who were working out the Mission Rules. And so, when you got all through with your arguing, you had everybody on board and everybody was supposed to know what they were going to do. WARD: Was that a more-or-less unique contribution of NASA? MCDIVITT: Pardon? WARD: The development, evolution of Mission Rule concepts; is that something that NASA really contributed to spaceflight or to that sort of testing? Or was it something that came out of previous experience with programs like X-15 and the military? MCDIVITT: Well, the X-15 Program—yeah, I see what you’re driving at. I don’t really know. But from what I—from my short experience with the X-15, there were Mission Rules there. But that was a NASA program. And I think that probably most experimental kinds of things had to have some rules. At least if I were running them, I’d want some rules associated with them. Now the simpler the vehicle and the simpler the task, the fewer the
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.