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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 12-64 burden of getting the confidence back in the contractor and the vehicle back in operation. MCDIVITT: Yes. Yeah. Yeah. You know, in support of Joe Shea and some of his ideas and what he was doing—a lot of that stuff was already in work. I mean, this wasn’t something that we genned up after the fire. There was a Block II spacecraft. As a matter of fact, I was testing it at the time that the fire occurred. So, there was a Block II spacecraft that was significantly different than the Block I spacecraft. We still didn’t have all of the flammable material out. And so, we had to go back and do—redo that. And then we started looking for spark initiators that could have caused this problem. We never did find them. You know, we never knew exactly what caused the fire; so, we didn’t know exactly what we were trying to fix. But we—that spacecraft was a lot different—the remodeled Block II was a lot different than the original Block II. But the original Block II was a lot different than the Block I spacecraft. WARD: You alluded to the fact that we added a mission, which became Apollo 8, the first manned flight to the Moon. What was your reaction at the time when you became aware that they were—on just the first flight of the Saturn V with a crew on it, then only the second flight with the Apollo spacecraft, were contemplating sending it to the Moon? MCDIVITT: Remember we talked earlier about, you can’t go—you can get there going— using little itty-bitty steps, but it takes you a couple of centuries. And so, we were going big steps. And that didn’t seem like any bigger step than any other of the big steps. It didn’t seem illogical. We had—there were a lot of things that we had to do. When we sat down early in the Apollo Program and laid out what the C mission ought to do, what the D mission ought to do, what the E mission, the F mission, the G
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