James A. McDivitt oral history (Doug Ward)

Johnson Space Center Oral History Project James A. McDivitt
29 June 1999 12-81
No, that’s my impression of it. And the guys you’d have to ask are Deke and George Low
and Joe Shea and Dr. Gilruth maybe. And, you know, most of those people you can’t talk to
anymore.
WARD: None of them are—
MCDIVITT: And I was 70 last week!
WARD: Were you involved in the decision at the end of Apollo, at the end of the program,
to end the mission at 17 rather than continue on with the hardware we had 18, 19, and 20?
MCDIVITT: No, I was adamantly opposed to that. And everybody knew it. And nobody
asked me. And I think it was unfortunate. You know, we had this tremendous investment.
We had probably $30 billion plus of 1962 dollars invested in Apollo at that time. We had the
command modules built. We had a number of the lunar modules under construction. I think
we had lunar modules up through Apollo 25 under construction. Some of them were just a
few pieces, you know; but then as you got closer back down to 17, there were more and more
of them. And we had—let’s see—yeah, we had 20—up through 20 all in, contracted for, and
everything was ready to go.
We were even looking at reusing the command modules after we dumped them in the
ocean. I spent six months trying to figure out how to do that, and I finally decided it was
totally unsafe, so that we could continue the program. And we even looked at landing on the
back side of the Moon, putting satellites up in orbit, and that was too hairy. I don’t think we
should have ever done that. But we had all these other things. And it was—you know, it was
all there. I mean, it didn’t cost much to fly one more flight. And then we chickened out.