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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.
“Nevers”36 pages
Johnson Space Center Oral History Project James A. McDivitt 29 June 1999 12-50 concerned that we were going to have a collision between our spacecraft and the rocket. And since it wasn’t that vital a part of the mission, I just let it go. WARD: Well, let’s talk a little bit about the transition now from Gemini to Apollo. You mentioned that you don’t think we could’ve flown Apollo successfully without the experience that we gained in Gemini. If you would, just kind of recapitulate for us what those essential elements were that came out of Gemini that we had to apply to Apollo. MCDIVITT: Well, one was the coordination between the ground people and the people in flight. That was one thing. We developed a rendezvous technique, understood what we had to do there. We developed some EVA experience, not a lot, but we figured out that it wasn’t a piece of cake. And although we didn’t have—on a normal Apollo mission, we didn’t have to do anything outside the spacecraft other than walk around on the Moon—I mean, we didn’t have to float around up in space and do things—there was the potential of a stuck hatch and we might have to go extravehicular to get from the lunar module back to the command module. So, we got enough expertise in that. And then I think that designing the Gemini spacecraft so that it could be used by the pilot allowed us to design Apollo spacecraft so that it could be used by the pilot. And there were a lot of problems that we had with things failing that, when I was a Program Manager, we hardly ever had a flight where we didn’t have 40 or 50 failures between the two spacecraft. And we were able to overcome those on all the flights except Apollo 13. And so, by just having all these alternate paths, of electrical paths or hydraulic paths or fuel paths where we could manipulate things, we were able to overcome these problems and never get down to where we were on our last system, which would have caused us to come home. I think those are the main things that we did.
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