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 12-48 Mylar balloon up there, I forget what they called it, Echo, I think it was. They wanted to know if we wanted to see Echo. It was out at, like, 800 or 900 miles. And we said, “Oh yeah, let’s look at that.” So, we got the spacecraft oriented around in a certain direction, and I had a six-power telescope in the left-hand window of the spacecraft. And Dave [David R.] Scott went down in the lower equipment bay. He had to use a 28-power telescope down there. And so, they finally said, “Okay, it’s coming up in the sight now.” And Dave said, “Oh yeah, I’ve got it.” He had the telescope tracking it with the computer. And so, I looked out there and, “Oh yeah,” I said, “I can see it.” And Rusty was sitting over in the other window and he didn’t have anything, and he said, “Oh yeah, I can see it, too!” So, we were looking at this thing probably near 1,000 miles. And later on in the flight, they wanted to know if we could—if we wanted to see the ascent stage, which we put in this huge orbit around the Earth. And it was coming down, and it was some thousands of miles away. They wanted to know if we wanted to see it. “Oh yeah, let’s see if we can find it.” So, we put the orbit into our computer and had our telescope track it. And we could see it. Now, we were using a 28-powered telescope, but we could see it out at some number of thousand of miles. WARD: This was your Apollo booster? MCDIVITT: Yeah. It actually was the ascent stage of the lunar module. WARD: Oh, okay. MCDIVITT: Which was not very large. WARD: When you were on your Gemini flight, one of the other objectives was to rendezvous
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.