James A. McDivitt, who commanded NASA’s first spacewalk mission and later took part in the first crewed orbital flight of a lunar module, a key step toward a human landing on the moon, died on Friday. He was 93.
NASA announced his death but did specify the cause or say where he died.
When he joined the Air Force in 1951 as an aviation cadet after attending junior college, Mr. McDivitt had “never been in an airplane, never been off the ground,” as he recalled in an interview for NASA’s Johnson Space Center Oral History Project.
He went on to fly 145 fighter missions during the Korean War, became an Air Force test pilot, then was selected by NASA in September 1962 as one of nine astronauts for the Gemini program, the bridge between the original Mercury Seven astronauts and the Apollo missions leading to the moon landings.
Mr. McDivitt was in command of the Gemini 4 capsule, which orbited the earth for nearly 98 hours over four days in June 1965, a record for a two-person spaceflight.
The mission’s primary goal was to determine whether astronauts could withstand prolonged time in space, something they did just fine. But its most celebrated achievement was a pioneering 20-minute spacewalk by Mr. McDivitt’s fellow crewman, Edward H. White 2d, who had been his classmate at the University of Michigan and had become his best friend.
Mr. McDivitt created a stir of his own when he reported spotting what appeared to be a satellite orbiting near his spacecraft and took photographs of it.
As he later told it in the NASA oral history: “It had a geometrical shape similar to a beer can or a pop can and with a little thing maybe like a pencil or something sticking out of it. It was all white.”
But when NASA and Mr. McDivitt looked at the photos, they found nothing that resembled a U.F.O. Mr. McDivitt felt that his photographs had been out of focus, but he came to doubt that he had, in fact, seen another spacecraft. He said that he had probably glimpsed a piece of ice or Mylar that had fallen off his space capsule.
The supposed U.F.O. saga trailed him over the years. He once wryly remarked, “I became a world-renowned expert on U.F.O.s — unfortunately.” Nonetheless, he had some fun with it. In January 1974, he played himself in an episode of “The Brady Bunch” TV series in which he told of the sighting and suggested that earthlings were not alone in the universe.
Mr. McDivitt’s second and last space mission came in March 1969, when he commanded the Apollo 9 flight, a 10-day orbiting of the earth by a three-person crew. Mr. McDivitt flew with Russell L. Schweickart in a pioneering test of the lunar module, the prototype of the space vehicle that carried Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin to the moon four months later. With David R. Scott piloting the Apollo 9 craft, the lunar module disengaged from it, orbited more than 100 miles away and then returned to it.
James Alton McDivitt was born on June 10, 1929, in Chicago and grew up in Kalamazoo, Mich. After attending high school there, he worked as a water-boiler repairman, then went to Jackson Junior College in Jackson, Mich., before joining the Air Force.
After the Korean War, he was sent by the Air Force to the University of Michigan for his final two years of college. He graduated first in his class in 1959 with a Bachelor of Science degree in aeronautical engineering.
He became a test pilot at Edwards Air Force Base in California, then entered the Air Force aerospace research program there, a training facility for prospective astronauts. Soon afterward, he was picked for the Gemini program.
(In January 1967, less than two years after the orbiting of Gemini 4, his crewman and friend on that mission, Mr. White, and two other astronauts died when their Apollo spacecraft, mounted on a Saturn rocket at Cape Canaveral in Florida, burst into flames during a test.)
In spring 1969, Mr. McDivitt became manager of NASA’s lunar landing operation as preparations reached a climax for Apollo 11, the first moon landing. He was named overall program manager for the Apollo missions following that epic flight.
He retired from NASA and from the Air Force as a brigadier general in 1972 and was later an executive with Consumers Power Company, Pullman and the aerospace and electronics company Rockwell International.
Information about his survivors was not immediately available.
For all the celebrity status accorded astronauts in the early years of spaceflight, Mr. McDivitt had figuratively been brought down to earth by his own children.
Just after the public announcement that he had been chosen for Gemini 4, he gathered the children (he had three at the time) at the breakfast table one Saturday morning.
As he recounted it: “I said, ‘Kids, I’m going to tell you something really important. I’m going to fly in space soon.’”
His older children said they had already heard about it in school. His son Patrick, 4 years old at the time, had some news of his own to report: “Guess what, there’s a bug in the milk bottle on the front porch.”
