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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.
“Nevers”36 pages
Johnson Space Center Oral History Project James A. McDivitt 29 June 1999 12-27 rules. So, you don’t have to worry, you know, if you can’t light the engine, don’t drop the spacecraft kind of thing. Or if you drop the spacecraft and you can’t light the engine, you’ve got to have a rule. What are you going to do? Well, you’ve got to land underneath you or some simple thing like that. Well, as we got into Mercury, it was more complex. We got into Gemini, and that was more complex. We got into Apollo, it was very, very complex. So, the Mission Rules towards the end were rather comprehensive. But we lived by those Mission Rules. There were a lot of times when I was a Program Manager that we were—we came up against things where we had debated that Mission Rule many, many times and that was the Rule. And that’s what we were going to go by. So, if this thing broke then we’re going to have to do this. If the other thing broke, we were going to do that. And we weren’t going to deviate from that in real time because we’d already fought through, carefully, in the, you know—in a more relaxed manner what—the consequences of all these other alternatives would be. WARD: Mission Rules really sort of form the basis then for simulation and flight training, don’t they? MCDIVITT: Yes and no. Actually it could be said the other way. Flight training and simulation form the basis for the Mission Rules. I think it was a fluke. You could have a Mission Rule. You’re getting into training, and you find out one day you simulate that thing that, that Mission Rule is wrong; you change it in the simulation. You don’t change it in flight, but you change it in simulation. And that’s why once those Rules were pretty much set, you didn’t want to change them in flight because a lot of these consequences weren’t obvious to the casual observer. You know, you had to be there and see what would happen.
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