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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 12-52 some of the Mercury spacecraft were sort of sent down to the Cape in a basket of parts, and then they sort of put them together down there. And that really got the manufacturing flow pretty well messed up. So, when we did Gemini, there was a major effort to try to get the spacecraft built at the factory, shipped down to the Cape where all you had to do was test it, and then put it on a rocket and then you’re ready to go. Much more—much easier to manufacture something in the manufacturing facility than it is to manufacture something in a test facility. So, I think they learned that. And Gemini was 50% bigger than the Mercury. It looked like Mercury in the dimensional relationships, and the systems weren’t too much different. They were more sophisticated, but they would—so, it was just a, sort of the B-model of the Mercury. Whereas Apollo is an entirely different spacecraft. And quite frankly, North American had a lot of troubles trying to get this thing going. They were going from being an airplane company to a spacecraft company—a transition that McDonnell had done on Mercury on a much, much simpler vehicle. So, we had a lot of difficulties in design, in testing, and it just took a lot of time. When we finally got the first Apollo crew together, we used to work eight-hour days during the normal day doing normal kinds of things, but we tested the spacecraft 24-hours a day. So, you’d work during the day and then you’d have shifts at night, probably four- to six-hours shifts to test the spacecraft. Because the testing just took interminably long. And we were testing at the factory, but we were also manufacturing at the factory. So, we’d get part of it—you’d get part of it manufactured, and we’d test it. And you’d get some more manufactured, and we’d test it. It just took an awfully long time. And we didn’t have good test procedures, and we didn’t have any flight procedures either. So, that first crew—the prime crew and the backup crew—we had to write our in-flight procedures
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