In the first generation of America’s explorers in space, James McDivitt was neither the best known nor the most accomplished among his fellow astronauts. He compiled few personal firsts in his years of service to the space program. He was in the second intake of NASA astronauts, in 1962. Even when his face showed up on the cover of Time magazine, it appeared in the background. He never wrote his memoirs nor ran for political office, and, except for one entertaining exception, he seldom appeared on television.
When he died in Tucson, Arizona, last week at age 93, McDivitt had been out of the space program, and largely out of the public eye, for nearly a half-century. He had left NASA in 1972 and spent the balance of his career in a series of managerial posts in the corporate world, ultimately serving as a senior executive at Rockwell International, the defense and electronics manufacturer.
Yet in the early phases of orbital travel, and the decadelong race to the moon, it would be difficult to think of many pilots or engineers or systems analysts or astronauts, or NASA managers and bureaucrats, whose practical solutions to complex technical problems were more numerous than McDivitt’s. His ingenuity and personal courage, even his low-key temperament and quiet confidence, were precisely the model that fit America’s most urgent needs in its burgeoning space program.
Born in Chicago and raised in Michigan, McDivitt started out slowly. After graduating from high school, he worked for a time as a water-boiler repairman in Kalamazoo before enrolling in junior college and, in 1951, joining the Air Force. He had never before set foot in an airplane and, in a later interview about his career in flight, reflected that “I was in the Air Force [and] was accepted for pilot training before I had my first ride. So, fortunately, I liked it!”
Whatever the Air Force saw in McDivitt was amply rewarded. He undertook 145 combat missions in the Korean War, flying F-80 and F-86 aircraft. Afterward, he attended the University of Michigan, where he earned a degree in aeronautical engineering, graduating first in his class. He had been a veteran test pilot and aerospace researcher at Edwards Air Force Base in California when he was chosen by NASA to train as an astronaut for its Gemini program.
McDivitt’s first venture into space, during four days in June 1965, was a pivotal journey of risk and discovery. Gemini 4, with McDivitt in command, was designed to gather essential medical and engineering information about human endurance and capacity in space. It also featured NASA’s first 20-minute spacewalk when McDivitt’s fellow astronaut (and Michigan classmate and friend) Edward White successfully exited the spacecraft after McDivitt managed to open, and reopen and close, an unexpectedly recalcitrant hatch.
The subsequent Apollo missions were delayed by the tragic deaths of White and two other astronauts in a January 1967 fire on the launch site at Cape Canaveral, Florida. This made McDivitt’s next command flight, along with astronauts David Scott and Russell Schweickart, especially crucial. The 10-day Apollo 9 mission in March 1969 was the first and last orbital test of the lunar module that transported Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin to the moon and back the following August.
By that time, however, McDivitt had exchanged his own opportunity to go to the moon in favor of serving as NASA’s manager of lunar landing operations and, after Armstrong and Aldrin’s Apollo 11 triumph, serving as the program manager for all subsequent lunar missions.
McDivitt’s seriousness of purpose, while essential to NASA’s success, was not always absolute. During the Gemini flight, he observed a mysterious satellite — a seemingly metallic object with “a geometric shape similar to a beer can … all white” — which he later surmised might be ice, Mylar from the spacecraft, or a window reflection. “So I became a world-renowned expert on UFOs — unfortunately,” he ruefully recalled, earning him a cameo appearance in 1974 on The Brady Bunch.
