James A. McDivitt oral history (Doug Ward)

Johnson Space Center Oral History Project James A. McDivitt
29 June 1999 12-91
WARD: While we’re on the subject of the press, during your tenure as Program Manager
NASA made a couple of very significant decisions with regard to media relations. One of
which was to allow the reporters in Mission Control with access to the flight director’s loop.
That went into effect on Apollo 13. And another management decision, and both of these, I
think, went all the way to [NASA] Headquarters, was to permit the press to hold in-flight
press conferences with crews. What was your reaction to both of those decisions at the time
they went?
MCDIVITT: Well, I supported them. I thought that we should never interfere in any way with
the flight crews on a lunar-landing mission until they were in the command module
transearth flight. And, you know, we didn’t do anything up until that time to distract them
one iota from it. I even had them, you know, they were a lot of really good scientific ideas
going around at NASA.
And I put out a letter to all of NASA Centers, “If you guys can come up with an
experiment that has no interface with the spacecraft other than the 28 bolts and you can write
the directions on how to use this thing on a simple sheet of paper, we’ll carry them, because
we have enough extra weight capacity,”—in those days— “we will carry it in a thing. And if
the crew gets around to it, they can do the experiment on the way home. But no training
involved. None!” Unfortunately, the crews would cheat on me and go train a little bit.
And the same thing applied to the public relations aspect of it. Until they had landed
on the Moon and come back off and their mind was clear of all that stuff, and then on the
way home, I didn’t have any problem with it. And I didn’t have any problem with guys
listening to the flight controller’s loop. I mean, they got it delayed anyway sometimes, and
there’s no—