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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.
“Mission Control”9 pages
Johnson Space Center Oral History Project James A. McDivitt 29 June 1999 12-51 WARD: At what point in Gemini did you begin transitioning to Apollo? Was that immediately after your flight? MCDIVITT: Well, yeah. After Gemini IV, I Capcomed Gemini V. That was pretty quickly for six or eight weeks probably. And then as soon as that was over, I went over to Apollo and I took over the overall engineering for Apollo for the Astronaut Office. So, I left the guidance and navigation business that I had been doing earlier on; I just took over the whole thing. Then we had—by that time we had more astronauts, and they were working some of these other issues. And then I started spending a awful lot of time out in California, working on the command module, because the lunar module wasn’t far enough along yet—although I did do some work there. But mostly it was on the command module. And then after—I don’t remember the timeframe a year or six months—we put together the first Apollo crew. And I was the commander of the backup crew on that. So, we had Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee as the prime crime; and I was the commander of the backup crew with Dave Scott and Rusty [Russell L.] Schweickart. WARD: And of course, the transition to Apollo also meant a transition to a new contractor, a new team of industry partners in North American [Rockwell Corporation] and Grumman [Aircraft Engineering Corporation]. How was that perceived within NASA? What level of confidence did the astronaut corps have in this new industry team? MCDIVITT: Yeah, well, the McDonnell guys were already experienced when they got to Gemini. They had done Mercury. They’d learned a lot of things from a management, a manufacturing standpoint in Mercury that they tried to avoid in Gemini. I understand that
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