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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 12-55 We didn’t have anything like that in Gemini. It was too small, and we didn’t have the sensitivity that we did. But it was a very complicated problem. WARD: But it was just part of the process of bringing a new vehicle on line. MCDIVITT: Yeah, it was. And then we had—because there was such a rush to get to the Moon in a certain time that they put together a design on the Block I spacecraft that we realized early on wasn’t going to make it to the Moon. We were going to have to do certain things to it that were going to change the configuration. Not the exterior aerodynamic shape, but things like the hatch. It was extremely difficult to get the hatch on or open. We actually had to take it off. So, we redesigned the hatch. The contraption that opened up the door on the telescope didn’t work well. It was prone to failure, and we didn’t want it to fail open. So, we had to design that. I think we changed that even for the Block I spacecraft. Some of the instrumentation had to be changed, because you didn’t—you weren’t going to be making a lunar return reentry at Earth. You were going to be just doing an Earth orbital reentry, and you could get by with the instrumentation we had. The fuel tanks were sized a certain way, and then we decided that that wasn’t going to be enough fuel in them to do the trip to the Moon and the rendezvouses and getting back and all that. So, there were a significant number of changes that were going to go in between Block I and Block II. WARD: And Block I was perceived as the Earth orbital test vehicle. MCDIVITT: It was really going to be the Earth orbital. What we wanted to do was to get that thing in flight for a ten-day mission or so to see if it was—how the systems operated. We
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