James “Jim” McDivitt, a former astronaut who commanded NASA’s first spacewalk during the Gemini 4 mission and later passed on a chance to land on the Moon to become program manager for five Apollo missions, died Thursday, Oct. 13, 2022. McDivitt was 93 years old.
Jim McDivitt’s life before Gemini 4 and Apollo
For an astronaut who played a pivotal role in America’s first spacewalk during Gemini 4 in 1965, James Alton McDivitt showed little outward sign of budding genius in his youth. The retired Air Force brigadier general and two-time space traveler instead discovered his lifelong love of aviation amid the horrors of aerial combat.
Born in Chicago, Illinois, on June 10, 1929, McDivitt was a son of an electrical engineer and progeny of a staunchly Roman Catholic family. He was schooled in Kalamazoo, Michigan, before working for a year fixing furnaces. “I went to junior college while I got a scholarship to Michigan State,” McDivitt said in a NASA Johnson Space Center (JSC) Oral History interview in 1999. “I didn’t have enough money to go there, so I had to go back to work.”
