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.
“Gemini 4”2 pages
Johnson Space Center Oral History Project James A. McDivitt 29 June 1999 12-34 what? oh, a couple of weeks I guess. WARD: But you kept all the preparations pretty quiet. MCDIVITT: Yeah, they were quiet up until a few days before the flight. WARD: Do you think the primary motivation was to score a first with the spacewalk? Or was it to click off that objective because you knew you would need EVA [extravehicular activity] in Apollo? McDivitt: Oh, I think originally it was to score the first! But then as we—and it probably wasn’t until after the flight that we really began to appreciate the fact that working outside a spacecraft was a lot different than working inside the spacecraft. And then we had—I think we had an EVA on almost every other flight, other than—I guess [Gemini] V, VI, and VII didn’t have EVA. VIII didn’t have one because it—we had to bring it down too early. But the rest of them all did. And that again was a part of the experience that you had to gain to be able to do the Apollo stuff. It—you know, no EVA experience going into Apollo would have been a serious problem. WARD: How did you know what to train for, for that first one? MCDIVITT: Well, this is one of those ad hoc things. You sort of made it up as you went along. The gun—that little maneuvering gun that we used fortunately didn’t have much thrust, because it was a hopeless device! I mean, there was no way you could really control yourself. You could control yourself on the air table in two axes; but unfortunately when you’re in space, you’re in three axes in six degrees of freedom. So, it would have been
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.