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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 12-62 crew shift. And we didn’t have any numbers for these flights. They were all lettered in those days. There was a C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, L—and— The C flight was a Earth orbital flight. The D flight was a Earth orbital flight with the lunar module. The E flight was a deeper space flight with the lunar module. The F flight was the fly out to the Moon, practice going down, but don’t land and come back. And then the—I guess G was the landing flight. Then H was the flights that we flew in exploratory mode. So, we—the C flights went from two to one. Then I was on the back—then I was the prime on the lunar module thing. So, it took us a while to figure out what all the problems were that had caused the fire; and when we got that sort of sorted out, I moved from the command module that would’ve been the command module for the first lunar module flight over to the next command module. And that first command module then became the command module that Wally and his crew flew for the first time. So, now I was on the second Block II command module, but the first lunar module. Then we started having a lot of trouble getting the lunar module through tests. The same problem that we had on the command module; the same problem that we had on Mercury and Gemini. We got to the point where we decided that the wiring in the lunar module, LM-2, was not safe to be flown. They were using an ultra-lightweight concept where they had a wire coming out of a black box; and instead of putting it into a plug, we were soldering it together using shrink sleeve. Shrink sleeving is a plastic tube that you put over a wire, put the two wires together, you solder them, you move the shrink sleeving down over the soldered joint as insulation heat—using heat, kind of like on a hair dryer, and it shrinks down and grabs a hold of it. Well, if you have a solder joint that’s not a good solder joint, the shrink sleeving will hold it together and you’ll have an intermittent electrical contact. We had intermittent
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