James A. McDivitt (left in photo above), former commander of the Apollo 9 mission and testing the first complete set of equipment for the Moon landing, died at the age of 93 in Tucson, Arizona.The Apollo 9 circumnavigation of Earth was one of the least-remembered space missions of the NASA program. McDivitt, who told his story in 1999, said that he was not bothered by this obscurity. The Moon landing didn’t happen then, but the Lunar Module was key to the whole program.
McDivitt’s mission with Apollo 9 crewmates Rusty Schweikart and David Scott was the first space test of a lightweight Moon landing module called Spider. The goal was to test whether it could house humans, dock in orbit, and power its engines to power the spacecraft complex, including the Gumdrop command module.
Apollo 9 mission successfully accomplished
The Apollo 9 mission lasted 10 days in March 1969 – four months before Neil Armstrong’s moon landing – and was relatively uneventful. McDivitt was involved in directing the Apollo Moon landing module and then the Houston portion of the entire program.
McDivitt was also the commander of the Gemini 4 mission in 1965, when his best friend and colleague Ed White carried out the first spacewalk in the United States. The photographs White took during the spacewalk had become iconic.
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