INSIDE MAN

To be fair, both McDivitt and White only received a minimum amount of rendezvous training and the primary focus of their mission was the EVA itself. For this task, James Alton McDivitt would be the Inside Man, although, fully-suited, he would be exposed to vacuum throughout White’s spacewalk.

The first Roman Catholic to be launched into space, son of an electrical engineer and the first American astronaut to command a crew on his first flight, McDivitt was born in Chicago, Illinois, on 10 June 1929. Described as “whippet-lean” by Time magazine, his 1.8 m frame was one that was forced to squeeze its way uncomfortably into the Gemini capsule before the Stafford Bump eased the tall astronauts’ suffering. Yet his background, unlike White’s, did not immediately mark him out as an obvious spacefarer. After graduating from high school in Kalamazoo, Michigan, he worked for a year as a furnace repairman, then drifted into college in 1948, vaguely describing his ambitions for the future as either a novelist or an explorer. Two years later, he completed his education and opted to enter the Air Force, discovering a love of aviation whilst flying 145 combat missions over Korea. His achievements were rewarded with three Distinguished Flying Crosses and five Air Medals.

After Korea, in 1957, McDivitt was sent by his parent service to read for an aeronautical engineering degree at the University of Michigan, where he proved himself to be a straight-A student, graduating first in his 607-strong class. Whilst at Michigan, he met Ed White for the first time, though he could hardly have guessed how far their friendship would endure. He was selected for the Experimental Test Pilot School at Edwards Air Force Base and seemed a likely candidate to fly the X – 15 rocket-propelled aircraft, but applied instead for the 1962 astronaut class. Despite Time having labelled him as “a superb pilot and a first-class engineer’’, McDivitt approached his NASA career from a purely practical and technical standpoint. “There’s no magnet drawing me to the stars,’’ he was quoted as saying. “I look on this whole project as a real difficult technical problem – one that will require a lot of answers that must be acquired logically and in a step-by-step manner.’’