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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 12-57 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.
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