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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.
“Borman”5 pages
Johnson Space Center Oral History Project James A. McDivitt 29 June 1999 12-65 mission, what all those things had to do, they weren’t assigned a flight number. People were assigned a mission letter. And we would’ve flown C five times if we’d had to, to get the spacecraft to where we could go on to the next mission. C turned out to be okay, so we could do this other one. And the same thing with the lunar module. If we had flown a first lunar module and it wouldn’t have worked, the next mission would not have been F. It would have been C or D all over again, or whatever it was that we needed. We might’ve made some modifications, but it turned out that the only modification we made in the whole plan, from the way it was laid out originally, was that we eliminated E and put [Apollo] 8 in there, which didn’t have a letter. I mean, it’s marvelous to think back on it! That we were—you know, that we were that farsighted and that it all worked out that way. Because I know a lot of times I’d come home from work and say to my wife, “There’s no way we’re ever going to get to the Moon. It’s just impossible!” We were never going to get the weight on the lunar module down low enough, and I just never thought we were going to get it light enough to do what it needed to do. WARD: Were you surprised that that mission went as relatively smoothly as it did? MCDIVITT: Which mission? WARD: Apollo 8. MCDIVITT: No. No, I thought it would go that way. The one I thought—the one I was most concerned about was Apollo 11, because you had to have so many things in a serial path that had to work. Apollo 8 was much simpler. It had just a command module and a service
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