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.
“Mission Control”9 pages
Johnson Space Center Oral History Project James A. McDivitt 29 June 1999 12-40 gotten there. I think when the President said, “we’re going to get there in that decade,” he provided the best management tool ever known to man. Because you could say, “We’ve got to stop fooling around and make a decision. Take a big step.” And so, we did. WARD: Your flight—your Gemini IV mission—was also the first flight where Mission Control was located, prime, in Houston. MCDIVITT: Right, right. WARD: Did that change anything? MCDIVITT: Not really. We had a backup—the Control Center down at the Cape was in operation. And I believe Glynn [S.] Lunney was the flight director at the Cape. He never got involved in the mission, because the one in the Mission Control Center in Houston operated fine. But we had a backup, and that wasn’t a big deal. And the tracking and things like that were all independent of what flight Control Center you used. So, they were getting the same tracking data at the Cape as they were getting in Houston. So, that really didn’t affect anything. The thing that—probably the biggest issue we had with respect to—other than the people flying the spacecraft, was with the doctors. As I mentioned earlier, this thing started out as a medical experiment; and it still was. That was still a primary function of the mission, was finding out what kind of shape we were going to be in when we landed. And about a week or so before the flight, there was a big medical uproar about whether we were going to die or not when we landed, because we were going to land in the sitting position, like this [gestures]. Up until that time all the people who landed were in the prone position—
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.