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.
Johnson Space Center Oral History Project James A. McDivitt 29 June 1999 12-44 to make a judgment, and flying airplanes keeps that sharpness I think, when that’s what you need to do. When it happens, you’ve got to decide right then what you’re going to do. WARD: And of course, the event we’re talking was ignition of the engines without liftoff and the fear that the vehicle might have lifted off a few inches and set back down— MCDIVITT: Yeah. Yeah. Fallen back down. WARD: —and exploded. MCDIVITT: Yeah. Yeah. I don’t like heights. And on Gemini IV, they couldn’t get the umbilical tower down. It was pivoted at the bottom; and instead of moving back like this, it laid down like that [gestures]. And it would go down partway and then it would stop. And then they would bring it back up, and I could—and if you’re looking straight up, through the window, and I could see it over the back of my head I could see what was left of the White Room, which was a big U-shaped thing that would come up around the rocket. And if this were the rocket and this U-shaped thing were coming up like this, it was coming up sideways like that [gestures], where it was going to hit the spacecraft. And right at the last second, it would jump over and do this [gestures]. Then I had visions of this thing coming up and hitting the spacecraft and us tumbling off! I don’t think that ejection seat would’ve worked then! I sure got tired of that! It did give us an opportunity, though, to sit there for a while. As a matter of fact, Ed and I both fell asleep up on top of the rocket. And they finally had to wake us up and ask us if we’d like to talk to our wives. We had a chance to talk to our wives from the spacecraft just before launch, while they were fiddling around, getting that thing down.
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.