James A. McDivitt oral history (Doug Ward)

Johnson Space Center Oral History Project James A. McDivitt
29 June 1999 12-6
And so, finally he told me in no uncertain terms that I was going to school! So, I saluted and
said, “Yes, sir! I didn’t really know you wanted me to!” So, anyway I went down through
there. But I was the first student in the Aerospace Research Pilot School.
WARD: Was this in preparation for Dyna-soar?
MCDIVITT: Yeah, it was really to get people in the Air Force qualified to get into space as
pilots. And the Air Force was talking Dyna-soar at the time. They didn’t really have
anybody assigned to it but there was a concept. There was going to be an Air Force space
program. Keeping in mind also that, at that time, there wasn’t a definition of the roles and
missions of all the different military services and NASA. As a matter of fact, the Air Force
and the Army were still fighting over who was going to have control of ballistic missiles.
Anyway, I pretty much got sent to the Aerospace Research Pilot School. And I was
a student, and Frank Borman was one of the instructors. He’d just graduated from the Test
Pilot School and went right in there as an instructor. We had a couple of other guys. And
what really happened was that there were let’s see, one, two, three—there were about four of
us—three pilots and an engineer—that really put the class together. Put the curriculum
together. I did most of the flying for the flying curriculum part. We designed—wrote the
specs for—we didn’t design, but we wrote the specs for simulators. We wrote the specs for
changing some of the airplanes; putting a rocket engine on it. If you’ve seen The Right Stuff,
that was—that really came out of the Test Pilot School. We taught each other. We just sort
of divided up the things that we wanted to—thought we ought to learn, and then one of us
would bone up on that and then we’d teach the other guys. And then we went around the
country, finding different universities that could support us, and—