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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.
“Edwards Air Force Base”3 pages
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.
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