James A. McDivitt oral history (Doug Ward)

Johnson Space Center Oral History Project James A. McDivitt
29 June 1999 12-57
spacecraft at five psi over atmospheric, which was 20 psi. We had a 100% oxygen
environment. I did the same test on top of the Gemini that they were doing at the time that
the fire occurred. And we did it on every Gemini spacecraft. I think we did it on every
Mercury spacecraft, too.
WARD: Do you think the reason for that, and the reason that it appeared so obvious in 20/20
hindsight but was not really apparent at the time, was that we might have been concentrating
so heavily on the environment we knew was going to be dangerous, i.e., space, and
overlooked the dangers while they were still on the launch pad?
MCDIVITT: Well, this was a—no, I think it was a—I don’t think it was—that was not a
single reason for it. It was a myriad of reasons. First, we were designing a new spacecraft.
We had all kinds of stowage problems in the spacecraft. We had all kinds of things that we
were going to have to carry. We had webbing and netting in there that we knew was a
problem, a fire problem. I talked to Joe [Joseph F.] Shea, the [Apollo] Program Manager,
about it and we knew that that was a problem. And we had plans to change all that stuff out
before this flight. They didn’t quite get to it. And we didn’t have any idea how fast it would
burn.
To this day, nobody knows how the fire started. But we just had a lot of
bad circumstances come together. And some of the North American people maintain to this
day that they were never told that the spacecraft would ever be tested in this configuration. If
they didn’t know it, they were the only people in the whole world that didn’t know it. But,
you know, everybody had their own idea how this was going to work, I guess. But it was one
of those circumstances. You had all this flammable material in there and a 100% oxygen
environment at 20 psi. That’s seven times more oxygen than we have in this room right now.