“Nevers”36 pages
- p. 1 …the Air Force—I’d
never been in an airplane. Never been off the ground. I…
- p. 3 …Having never been in
an airplane and no idea what it was all about, and I…
- p. 7 …was that the Dyna-
soar Program would never fly. The spacecraft was wrong. They were trying…
- p. 8 …You know, it was a lifting
body concept and the landing thing, but it never flew…
- p. 10 …I wanted you to know that I realize that I should never have threatened you like…
- p. 14 …As soon as we got selected, we were told that, “No more uniforms.” We were never…
- p. 19 …T-38s never had much fuel, and you
- p. 20 …And some—you
know, we didn’t have everything available in the spacecraft, so never was…
- p. 22 …It never existed then. So, there was always disagreement amongst the
astronauts about what the relationship…
- p. 28 …So, there’s
always the thought that, well, maybe he was never going to come around…
- p. 33 …We’d never had a flight longer than 30 hours, or
whatever it was, that Gordo…
- p. 38 …You know, he
never got sick flying airplanes and the crazy motions that we did. And…
- p. 39 …I mean, we would’ve never
gotten to the Moon when we did if we’d…
- p. 40 …He never got
involved in the mission, because the one in the Mission Control Center in…
- p. 43 …Fortunately, we never had to try that!
WARD: Do you think the nature of the ejection…
- p. 45 …And I never did see it again.
- p. 46 …I never did see it until years and years later, when I started getting all
these…
- p. 49 …So, you never see more than one light, or hardly ever see more than one light…
- p. 50 …were able to overcome these problems
and never get down to where we were on our…
- p. 54 …and backup crews did except they were never going to fly. So, they helped us test…
- p. 57 …And some of the North American people maintain to this
day that they were never told…
- p. 59 …And then I never
dealt with him again; and finally he got fired. So, I don…
- p. 64 …We never did find them. You know, we never knew exactly what caused the fire;
so…
- p. 65 …It’s just impossible!” We were never going to get the weight on the lunar module…
- p. 69 …Throttled the engine up
and down through regimes it probably was never throttled at when it…
- p. 74 …Well, that was never my attitude. That was never my attitude. As
a matter of fact…
- p. 83 …It never occurred except for the fire, but I
know I personally expected a lot of…
- p. 85 …I threw him out of my
office and I said, “You are never, ever to come…
- p. 86 …I ran
the Apollo Spacecraft Program I never had a problem with money. We were always…
- p. 87 …And I’d never played baseball in my life!
- p. 91 …I thought that we should never interfere in any way with
the flight crews on a…
- p. 94 …And I think that we would’ve never had an Apollo Program if Rocco hadn’t…
- p. 99 …I never did get my Major’s on my shoulders. He called
Ed up, promoted Ed…
- p. 105 …said who was recommending it but they never said who was
opposed to it. So, we…
- p. 108 …He never second-guessed me. He had a boss. The
Associate Administrator for Manned Spaceflight and…
- p. 109 …And fortunately, my bosses were
such that they never second-guessed what I did. They just…
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.