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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 12-38 MCDIVITT: Oh that was all a misconception. I mean, people made a big deal about that. It was no big deal at all. He was just having a ball out there. He didn’t want to come back in. I wanted him to come back in because I didn’t want to have to work on that hatch in the dark. But, even if he’d have come back in when I told him to come back in, we would’ve still been working on the hatch in the dark—because it took him a lot longer to get back in and get back down in it and buckled down. Fortunately, Ed was the same height as I was; but he was much shorter in the sitting height. I mean, I would be up here and he’d be down here sitting down. So, we didn’t have a problem of trying to get the hatch closed. Our problem was getting it latched and locked. And so, he wasn’t in the way when I was trying to do that stuff. But then there was euphoria. The press got a hold of that and created something great out of absolutely nothing. As usual! WARD: Was there any sense of space motion sickness at that time? Later crews, once they had the latitude to move— MCDIVITT: No. None. None. And Ed had a very weak stomach. He had a weak stomach. Every time we went up in a zero-g airplane, he got sick. As soon as we landed in the water, he was sick. I mean, he was—he had a very, very sensitive stomach to that. You know, he never got sick flying airplanes and the crazy motions that we did. And we were short on fuel, so the spacecraft was just tumbling for a couple of days. Just around like this [gestures]. And it didn’t bother him at all. WARD: Did the relative ease of your EVA perhaps mislead NASA, for the later ones into thinking that we really understood that process when we didn’t?
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