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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 12-75 with it. Scientists were up to here with it. Everybody was fighting for it! But it was a—you know, I always thought that, you know, that was the reason we were doing it. WARD: Well, you really took some concrete steps, did you not, to improve the relationship with the scientific community? MCDIVITT: Yeah. Yeah, I did. You know, they were—they used to get as excited in some of their things like site selections and other things like that. I mean, those generated as much heat as the battles that we used to have between the flight controllers and the astronauts, or the engineering guys and the flight controllers, the engineering guys and the astronauts, or the program guys and the astronauts. As a matter of fact, I remember one meeting—as a matter of fact, it was the only time I did it at NASA—we were involved in a site selection. And some of the scientists would like to land on this four-inch square on top of a mountain peak. And of course, we weren’t going to try anything like that. One of the guys, whose name will go unmentioned, got so obnoxious at the meeting I finally said to him, “Okay,”—his name wasn’t Charlie, but let’s call him Charlie—I said, “Okay, Charlie, we don’t do that in here. You go outside and sit. When you feel that you can talk like a normal human being, you can come back in here and join in with the rest of it.” And so, he thought I was kidding. And I said, “I’m not joking. Get out of here!” “You can’t get me out of here. I’m from Headquarters!” And I said, “Get out of here!” So, he left. And 20 minutes later, he came back in; and we conducted—we continued the meeting without him. And then when he got back, we continued the meeting with him. And we finally came to a reasonable compromise on what we’d do. And—
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