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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.
“Kennedy Space Center”1 page
Johnson Space Center Oral History Project James A. McDivitt 29 June 1999 12-67 have been one of the more dangerous missions we flew, and certainly one of the most important to the program. Kind of run through for us what you accomplished on that flight. MCDIVITT: Okay. Well, you know, I don’t have any problem with how it’s looked at by other people. I really don’t care! And I could see why they would; you know, it didn’t land on the Moon. And so, it’s hardly part of Apollo. But the lunar module was, as I mentioned earlier, key to the whole program. And trying to get it light enough to fly was a real challenge. We got to the point where we were filing little blousons off of castings and things like that to get the weight down. So, the main thing was that we got a chance to fly the lunar module to see if it really worked. We had a few minor glitches on the descent engine, as I recall, when we first started it up. And, oh, it worked fine. And the fact that the rendezvous worked okay. The computers worked. The radar worked. I mean, the—we did a damn good job of engineering it, because we really didn’t have very many big problems with the spacecraft. It all went together well. But we had to make sure that it went together well and that it would work, because it was really a flimsy little spacecraft. The first time—I’ve seen a lot of models. And they had solid sides to them and all that stuff. The first time Rusty and I went up to Grumman to do a storage review—a storage review is something you do before you really solidify where you’re going to put everything, and it’s so you can still make some changes—and I hadn’t been up there for a while. I was busy on the command modules at the time. And so, I went back up there and we went in the White Room. And we had hundreds of people, like NASA normally has. And we went over to this vehicle sitting there in the corner, and we had two different kinds of vehicles. We had non-flight vehicles that were heavy construction; we had the flight-weight vehicles. And we
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