“Nevers”36 pages
- p. 1 …the Air Force—I’d
never been in an airplane. Never been off the ground. I…
- p. 3 …Having never been in
an airplane and no idea what it was all about, and I…
- p. 7 …was that the Dyna-
soar Program would never fly. The spacecraft was wrong. They were trying…
- p. 8 …You know, it was a lifting
body concept and the landing thing, but it never flew…
- p. 10 …I wanted you to know that I realize that I should never have threatened you like…
- p. 14 …As soon as we got selected, we were told that, “No more uniforms.” We were never…
- p. 19 …T-38s never had much fuel, and you
- p. 20 …And some—you
know, we didn’t have everything available in the spacecraft, so never was…
- p. 22 …It never existed then. So, there was always disagreement amongst the
astronauts about what the relationship…
- p. 28 …So, there’s
always the thought that, well, maybe he was never going to come around…
- p. 33 …We’d never had a flight longer than 30 hours, or
whatever it was, that Gordo…
- p. 38 …You know, he
never got sick flying airplanes and the crazy motions that we did. And…
- p. 39 …I mean, we would’ve never
gotten to the Moon when we did if we’d…
- p. 40 …He never got
involved in the mission, because the one in the Mission Control Center in…
- p. 43 …Fortunately, we never had to try that!
WARD: Do you think the nature of the ejection…
- p. 45 …And I never did see it again.
- p. 46 …I never did see it until years and years later, when I started getting all
these…
- p. 49 …So, you never see more than one light, or hardly ever see more than one light…
- p. 50 …were able to overcome these problems
and never get down to where we were on our…
- p. 54 …and backup crews did except they were never going to fly. So, they helped us test…
- p. 57 …And some of the North American people maintain to this
day that they were never told…
- p. 59 …And then I never
dealt with him again; and finally he got fired. So, I don…
- p. 64 …We never did find them. You know, we never knew exactly what caused the fire;
so…
- p. 65 …It’s just impossible!” We were never going to get the weight on the lunar module…
- p. 69 …Throttled the engine up
and down through regimes it probably was never throttled at when it…
- p. 74 …Well, that was never my attitude. That was never my attitude. As
a matter of fact…
- p. 83 …It never occurred except for the fire, but I
know I personally expected a lot of…
- p. 85 …I threw him out of my
office and I said, “You are never, ever to come…
- p. 86 …I ran
the Apollo Spacecraft Program I never had a problem with money. We were always…
- p. 87 …And I’d never played baseball in my life!
- p. 91 …I thought that we should never interfere in any way with
the flight crews on a…
- p. 94 …And I think that we would’ve never had an Apollo Program if Rocco hadn’t…
- p. 99 …I never did get my Major’s on my shoulders. He called
Ed up, promoted Ed…
- p. 105 …said who was recommending it but they never said who was
opposed to it. So, we…
- p. 108 …He never second-guessed me. He had a boss. The
Associate Administrator for Manned Spaceflight and…
- p. 109 …And fortunately, my bosses were
such that they never second-guessed what I did. They just…
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].