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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 12-39 MCDIVITT: Oh, I think so, yeah. WARD: You mentioned— MCDIVITT: I think that we overreached a lot in the EVA thing to start with. We didn’t do anything. Like I told you, that gun was utterly useless. I’d practiced with it enough and I could run around the air table with it flying, but that was a two-dimensional thing. I could either go this way or that way, and there was no—there were six degrees of freedom. There’s three in motion and three in attitude. We had no attitude freedom whatsoever standing on that table. We were upright. And while you could rotate around this way, you couldn’t go back and forth this way or the other way [McDivitt demonstrates]. So, we really were lacking a lot of the degrees of freedom. As soon as we got up in space, the only way you could make that gun work is if you fired it exactly through your center of gravity. And trying to find your center of gravity—we didn’t know where our center of gravity was; so there was no way we could’ve done it accurately. Yeah, that was a oversimplified thing. And fortunately, we didn’t have much gas in the gun and didn’t put out much thrust; so it couldn’t hurt us much. WARD: But EVAs, spacewalks on the later flights, [Gemini] IX, X, XI, we had some really serious problems on them. MCDIVITT: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, because they were trying to do things. And I think we got carried away. But you know, there’s nothing wrong with that. I mean, we would’ve never gotten to the Moon when we did if we’d taken baby steps all the way. I mean, we could’ve gone from the Gemini IV EVA to a little bit more, a little bit more, and then we’d never have
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