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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 12-54 because four guys weren’t enough. And so, we had a lead guy and two or three helpers right towards the end of Gemini IV. So, that’s how the support team came about for specific flights. Well, we had something like that on Apollo; but we were getting to the point where six astronauts and these other guys really weren’t quite enough. And so, we were really running out of gas as far as having only 24 hours of daytime, six to all this stuff. And but we went pretty far along. We went all the way through the first one. As soon as I got into the next one, Apollo 9, with the lunar module, there was no way we could do that with six guys. So, we then came up with this concept of a support, I don’t remember what we called it, but we had another crew of astronauts, three astronauts, that sort of did the same things that the primaries and backup crews did except they were never going to fly. So, they helped us test there. But we didn’t have that on that first one, and it was just overwhelming. But I think that the six of us were disappointed that the testing wasn’t going better, that we were finding so many problems. But I think in—you know, in the real world that that was what we should have expected. Gus had worked on the first Gemini. I worked on the second one. So, we both knew how many problems you could get into in a new spacecraft. We were just getting into a lot of them on Apollo, but it was a much, much more sophisticated system. For instance, I remember one day I was going to check the lighting. I was just turning the lights back and forth. I was doing that, and all of a sudden the technician on the outside says, “Hey, the rocket engine out here is firing!” I mean, it didn’t have any fuel in it, but you could hear the solenoids going click-click, click-click, click-click. So, oh my, you know. We fired the rockets by moving the lights! So, we had what we called electromagnetic interference, and we had to go back and do that.
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