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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 12-69 of changes to it later on for the longer mission. And the command module worked out well, too. You know, we flew one flight—Earth orbital—then we flew it to the Moon. So, it— while we had a lot of trouble up front in getting these things designed, built, and tested, when we actually got them into flight they worked just the way they were supposed to. WARD: You did a—one other thing on your mission, Apollo 9, that ended up having some very important significance later on. That was the docked DIPS burn as it was called at the time. Docking with the lunar module docked to the command module and proving that you could control that whole stack while thrusting with the lunar module engine. MCDIVITT: Oh. Right. Yeah, that was like—that was what I was saying earlier. We did a bunch of tests that we—that helped me a lot when we were—when I was the Program Manager. Right. We did a dock burn with the lunar module. We did a bunch of oscillating tests with the command module. We did an EVA. We checked all the alternative methods of doing star alignments. We had multiple burns on the descent stage. Throttled the engine up and down through regimes it probably was never throttled at when it landed in the Moon. And it worked out really great. WARD: And in particular on Apollo 13, after the oxygen tank exploded enroute to the Moon and suddenly the lunar module had to take over a lot of the command module’s role, where would we have been if you had not done the things that you did on 9? MCDIVITT: Yeah. We’d have been a lot—it would have been a lot dicier! Yeah, because we had to work out those procedures for 9. And we worked them out and we knew they were going to work. I mean, they weren’t easy. It wasn’t easy to do. The guys flying the
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