James McDivitt was a NASA astronaut who commanded the Gemini 4 and Apollo 9 missions.
- Died: October 13, 2022 (Who else died on October 13?)
- Details of death: Died in his sleep in Tucson, Arizona at the age of 93.
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USAF, NASA, and beyond
McDivitt enlisted in the U.S. Air Force in 1951, flying combat missions in the Korean War. He remained in the military after the war, serving as a flight commander and a test pilot. McDivitt joined NASA in 1962, as they were looking to expand their group of astronauts. His first mission came in 1965, as command pilot of Gemini 4. He was the first NASA astronaut to command a mission as a spaceflight rookie. On Gemini 4, astronaut Ed White performed the first NASA spacewalk. While orbiting the Earth, McDivitt saw and photographed an unidentified flying object, which he said looked like a beverage can with a pencil sticking out of it. The UFO was never conclusively identified but McDivitt later said he thought it was a reflection of a bolt in the ship’s multipaned window. It was the only UFO sighting account in NASA history.
The following year, McDivitt was chosen as commander of the backup crew for Apollo 1, but that mission never flew after a disastrous test killed its crew. Backup plans were cancelled, and McDivitt was assigned to command Apollo 9. The 1969 mission involved important preparations for the Apollo 11 Moon landing, four months later. On Apollo 9, McDivitt and astronaut Rusty Schweickart transferred from the command module to the lunar module, the first time astronauts had moved from one spacecraft to another.
Later, McDivitt became Manager of the Apollo Spacecraft Program before retiring from NASA in 1972. He then had senior positions with Pullman, Inc. and Rockwell International. In 1974, he appeared as himself on an episode of “The Brady Bunch,” talking about his UFO sighting.
Notable quote
“The story of how I became a UFO expert! Well, what happened was that we were low on fuel and the spacecraft was just tumbling through space, end over end and sideways and all over. Ed was asleep. We were taking turns sleeping. And Ed was asleep, and I was doing something in the spacecraft. I looked outside, just glanced up, and there was something out there. It had a geometrical shape similar to a beer can or a pop can, and with a little thing like maybe like a pencil or something sticking out of it. That relative size, dimensionally. It was all white.” —from a 1999 oral history interview for NASA
Tributes to James McDivitt
Full obituary: The New York Times
