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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 12-49 with the upper stage. MCDIVITT: Right. WARD: That didn’t really work out. MCDIVITT: No. That was a—we didn’t use our head on that ahead of time! That was sort of an ad hoc thing that we put on when we did the—when we were going to do the EVA, we wanted to have something to EVA around. And so, we were going to have Ed fly over there and take a couple of pieces of metal off of it. But we made two fatal mistakes: one is that we put two lights on it—two flashing lights instead of three. If you take a cylinder and put two lights on it, you can see both those lights only in one position, when you’re perpendicular to the lights. As soon as it shifts around a little bit, one of the lights is obscured. So, you never see more than one light, or hardly ever see more than one light. And it’s very difficult to fly formation with one flashing bright light. So, as soon as we got into the dark, we had no depth perception on it whatsoever. The thing that really caused the problem, though, was the fact that the upper stage had a—when it shut down, they left a vent open on it to vent the propellant on it, which acted like a small rocket engine. And when we backed away from it and did our inertial measurement unit alignment, the rocket started maneuvering away from us. So, I had to curtail the alignment to get back down close to the rocket. And then as we went into the dark, it continued to maneuver around. And it didn’t have any stabilization anymore, so it could be going this way at one time and this way—some other way some other time. And so, I had to chase it around in the dark with only one light visible. And it just—I mean, there was no way to tell how far away we were. So, we finally gave up on that. I was
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