James A. McDivitt oral history (Doug Ward)

Johnson Space Center Oral History Project James A. McDivitt
29 June 1999 12-5
WARD: So often I’ve heard astronauts asked the question from your sort of background,
“How did you happen to go from being a test pilot to being an astronaut?” The standard
answer always has been, “Because it’s just a natural extension of test piloting.” But I get the
impression in your case that you may have been a little reluctant to give up the test pilot
business to take a shot at being an astronaut.
MCDIVITT: Well, both of those are right. It is a natural extension of flight testing. But after
I got out to Edwards and went through the Test Pilot School there, I got selected to stay at
Edwards as a test pilot. All the other guys went other places, but I got to stay there. And
there are very few fighter test pilots. I think we had nine or ten. And it was a great job.
Probably the best job that I’ve ever had.
And as we were—as I was going along really enjoying the fruits of my labor, so
to speak, I’d been there in flight test a couple of years when my boss called me in one day
and said, “Jim, we’ve got this really great opportunity for you. We’re going to—the Air
Force is starting up a school called, I think it was the Aerospace Research Pilot School or
something like that. But the concept was that we’d take guys who were already test pilots
and send them through the school and train them to be astronauts, keeping in mind that we
didn’t—really hadn’t flown anything at that time in space, and the Air Force had no space
program and a lot of other things.
WARD: Was this, what? 1960, ’61?
MCDIVITT: This was 19—about 1960 or—yeah, it was 1960 or ’61, I forget exactly the date.
And I promptly told him that I was not interested in it whatsoever! And I had—I’d just had
enough schooling for a while. I wanted to fly airplanes and continue to do what I was doing.