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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 12-68 go over there, and we get in the spacecraft, and we crawl in. And I can remember the first thing we did is we knocked off the shield around the environmental control system, which was a thing about as thick as a piece of paper and made out of plastic. And so, we get in there and we start checking the stowage. We weren’t checking the spacecraft. We were just checking to see if everything fit. Every time we turned around, something else broke! And I’m pretty mild-mannered and I don’t get excited when things aren’t going right. But after we were doing this for about five or six hours, and everything we touched fell off the wall or broke or it did something! Finally I got on the radio and I said, “Damn it, you guys! We’ve got—” you know, “we’ve got 200 people here. We’re all out here. We’ve been here all day long. We’re—and we’ve got this crappy training vehicle out here that, you know, we ought to get something that more resembles what the heck we’re going to fly with in space instead of this junk that we’ve got here! And, you know, this—” I went on and—went on like that. And then I shut up, and there’s this long pause. And finally somebody comes on the intercom and says, “Jim, that is the flight vehicle.” I looked at Rusty and he looked at me, and we said, “Oh my God! We’re actually going to fly something like this?” So, it was really chintzy. I mean the outside is Mylar; and, I mean, it was like cellophane and tin foil put together with Scotch tape and staples! I mean, it really is built like that. WARD: Of course, a lot of that’s a reflection of the fact that it doesn’t have to fly in the atmosphere. MCDIVITT: Yeah, it doesn’t have to fly in the atmosphere. They did go and beef up stuff on the inside though, because it was just really falling apart. But anyway, the lunar module worked out great. We made very few changes to it for the original missions. We made a lot
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