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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.
“Headquarters”6 pages
Johnson Space Center Oral History Project James A. McDivitt 29 June 1999 12-66 module. And it went—once it went, it was either going to work or it wasn’t going to work. But when you add the lunar module in there, you had all that stuff together, that was a—you know, that string of things that had to all be correct to make it get to the proper ending was pretty difficult. I thought that would be the most difficult mission. WARD: Well, and that’s where your flight, Apollo 9, comes in. Because you had to put all those elements together and prove that they work. MCDIVITT: Yeah. Yeah. As a matter of fact, I think it was quite fortuitous that I had a chance to fly on Apollo 9 and then became the Apollo Spacecraft Program Manager. Because the things I did on 9, which was really an engineering test flight, that stuff came into play so much more for me as the Program Manager, later on, when we were running into difficulties in the—when we had problems with the spacecraft when we were at the Moon or doing some other things that I had done all those tests myself. Personally. And so, I knew the difficulty of doing something. Like on Apollo 13, when we had to get it back. The star alignments and stuff like that, I had already done that myself. Rusty and I had done it. On Apollo 16, they had a—we had a problem with a actuator for the service module engine. It was oscillating. I’d already flown this whole stack where we deliberately oscillated an engine to gimbal like that. And I knew what it felt like inside the spacecraft. And fortunately, it had—and so, all that stuff that it—it was fortunate I had done it myself. So, when I got around to making—having to make decisions on those later Apollo landings, it made me more confident that the decision I was making to go forward was really right. WARD: In some respects, in comparison with other Apollo missions, Apollo 9 sometimes gets overlooked as being a rather mundane flight. And yet there are those who believe it may
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