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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 12-6 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—
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