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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 12-28 WARD: One of the things you began to sense in Gemini, and particularly in Apollo and then even more so in shuttle, is the complexity and the integration of systems, interactions, one event affecting another in a way that you really can’t intuitively follow or anticipate. And a simulation, it seems, would draw that out for you in ways you might not otherwise appreciate. MCDIVITT: Yeah. And I remember one case stands out very well in my mind. It was on Apollo 16, when I was the Apollo Spacecraft Program Manager. We were—the lunar module and command module had separated, and the command module [pilot, Thomas K. “Ken” Mattingly II] was supposed to fire his engine on the back side of the Moon and come around in a different orbit. And a certain—and if he had done that, he would have appeared from behind the Moon at a certain time. And that time came up; no spacecraft. So, there’s always the thought that, well, maybe he was never going to come around the Moon! But anyway then, the next time was—some seconds later would’ve been when he would have come around, had he not fired the engine. And sure enough, it came around at that time. He hadn’t fired the engines. And we checked what the problem was, and he said that he had an oscillating actuator on the service module engine; and the Mission Rules were that if you got down to your last system, you came home. It didn’t make any difference what it was—as long as it was a critical system. Well, that was a critical system obviously. So, we had to determine whether the oscillating actuator would work. WARD: Now this is the actuator that moves the engine nozzle that steers the— MCDIVITT: It moves—that moves the engine back and forth, and it was going like this [gestures]. Fortunately, I had flown a test like that on Apollo 9—it was called a stroking
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