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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 12-42 around there. So, we went through the motions, but there was no practical way of doing that! WARD: You bring up the issue of landing. Of course, early on Gemini was conceived as a land-landing spacecraft. MCDIVITT: Yeah. WARD: As the Russians did. All Russian spacecraft landed on the land, as you know. And the Americans had always landed in the water. When did you get involved in that engineering part of the problem where we concluded that Gemini wasn’t going to land on the land after all? MCDIVITT: Well, fortunately I didn’t get involved in the flight testing because I guess every one of them crashed! I got in sort of at the tail end of that. The decision was sort of being made as I got involved in the Gemini Program as a pilot, not in my engineering role. But as someone who was going to fly it. And after the decision was made to not land on the land but land in the water, we then got to evaluating the spacecraft in the water. And the hatches would’ve been like this [gestures] if we’d just landed in the water normally. But then when we opened up the hatches, the water would’ve come in both hatches That didn’t sound like a very good idea. So, we ballasted the spacecraft around this way, so the commander’s hatch was as far out of the water as you could get it. And the copilot’s hatch was under water. And then we put some canvas pieces across it so when you opened it up, we had as much freeboard as you could possibly get. To do that, they ballasted it, I think with ping pong balls to get it to float differently than the center of gravity would. WARD: Okay, I guess [Recorder turned off].
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