James A. McDevitt, leader in NASA’s early victories, dies at 93

On Thursday, James A. died. McDevitt, who led NASA’s first spacewalk mission and later participated in the first manned orbital flight of a lunar module, a major step toward a human landing on the Moon. He was 93 years old.

NASA He was pronounced dead but specified the cause or stated the place of his death.

When he joined the Air Force in 1951 as an aviation student after attending middle school, Mr. McDevitt was “never in an airplane, never on the ground,” he recalled in an interview with the NASA Johnson Space Center Oral History Project.

He went on to fly 145 fighter missions during the Korean War, became an Air Force test pilot, and was then selected by NASA in September 1962 as one of nine astronauts for the Gemini program, the bridge between the original Mercury Ships astronauts. The Apollo missions that led to the landing on the moon.

Mr. McDevitt was driving 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 primary goal of the mission was to determine if the astronauts could survive extended periods in space, which they did just fine. But the most famous achievement was a 20-minute spacewalk by McDevitt’s colleague, Edward H. White2D, who was his classmate at the University of Michigan and became his best friend.

Mr. McDevitt caused a stir of his own when he reported the discovery and photographed of what appeared to be a satellite orbiting near his spacecraft.

As he later put it in NASA’s Oral History: “It had a geometric shape similar to a beer can or a pop can, with a little something maybe like a pencil or something sticking out of it. It was all white.”

But when NASA and Mr. McDevitt looked at the images, they found nothing resembling a UFO. Mr. McDevitt felt his images were out of focus, but doubted that he had, in fact, seen another spacecraft. He said he might have spotted a piece of ice or a mylar that had fallen from his space capsule.

The supposed saga of UFOs follows him through the years. He once said sarcastically, “I’ve become a world-renowned expert on UFOs—unfortunately.” However, he enjoyed it. In January 1974, he played himself in an episode of the TV series “The Brady Bunch” where he talked about watching and suggested that Earthlings are not alone in the universe.

McDevitt’s second and final space mission came in March 1969, when he commanded the Apollo 9 flight, which orbited Earth for 10 days by a crew of three. Mr. McDevitt flew with Russell L. Schweickart in a pioneering test of the lunar module, the prototype of the spacecraft that carried Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin to the moon four months later. With David R. Scott driving the Apollo 9 spacecraft, the lunar module separated from it, orbited more than 100 miles, and then returned.

James Alton McDevitt was born on June 10, 1929 in Chicago and raised in Kalamazoo, Michigan. After attending high school there, he worked as a boiler repairman, then attended Jackson Junior College in Jackson, Michigan, before joining the Air Force.

After the Korean War, the Air Force sent him to the University of Michigan to spend his last two years in college. He graduated first in his class in 1959 with a Bachelor of Science in Aeronautical Engineering.

He became a test pilot at Edwards Air Force Base in California, then enrolled in the Air Force’s Aerospace Research Program there, a training facility for potential astronauts. Soon after, he was selected for the Gemini program.

(In January 1967, less than two years after orbiting Gemini 4, his crew, his 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, exploded into flames during testing. .)

In the spring of 1969, Mr. McDevitt became director of NASA’s lunar landing operation as preparations reached a climax for Apollo 11, the first moon landing. He was appointed Director General of the Apollo Missions Program after that epic flight.

He retired from NASA and the Air Force with the rank of brigadier general in 1972, and was later an executive director at Consumers Power, Pullman and Rockwell International Aerospace and Electronics.

No information was immediately available on survivors.

For all the celebrity status given to astronauts in the early years of spaceflight, Mr. McDevitt was metaphorically brought down to Earth by his children.

After publicly announcing his selection for Gemini 4, he gathered the kids (he had three at the time) at the breakfast table one Saturday morning.

As he recounted: “I said, kids, I’m going to tell you something really important. I’ll be flying into space soon.”

His older sons said they had already heard about it at school. His son Patrick, who was 4 at the time, had some news of his own to tell: “Guess what, there’s something wrong with the milk bottle on the front porch.”