Washington: James A McDivitt, the commander of the Apollo 9 mission, which tested the first complete equipment to go to the moon, has died. He was 93 years old.

McDivitt died Thursday in Tucson, Arizona, NASA said Monday.

McDivitt was also the commander of the Gemini 4 mission in 1965. There, McDivitt captured the historic images of his best friend and colleague Ed White, the first American to walk on the moon.

He passed on a chance to land on the moon and instead became the space agency's program manager for five Apollo missions after the Apollo 11 moon landing.

In his first flight in 1965, McDivitt reported seeing “something out there” about the shape of a beer can flying outside his Gemini spaceship. People called it a UFO and McDivitt would later joke that he became “a world-renowned UFO expert.” Years later he figured it was just a reflection of bolts in the window.

Apollo 9, which orbited Earth and didn't go further, was one of the lesser-remembered space missions of NASA's program.

Unlike many of his fellow astronauts, McDivitt did not yearn to fly from childhood. He was just good at it.

McDivitt didn't have money for college growing up in Kalamazoo, Michigan. He worked for a year before going to junior college. When he joined the Air Force at 20, soon after the Korean War broke out, he had never been on an airplane. He was accepted for pilot training before he had ever been off the ground.

McDivitt flew 145 combat missions in Korea and came back to Michigan where he graduated from the University of Michigan with an aeronautical engineering degree. He later was one of the elite test pilots at Edwards Air Force Base and became the first student in the Air Force's Aerospace Research Pilot School. The military was working on its own later-abandoned human space missions.

In 1962, NASA chose McDivitt to be part of its second class of astronauts, often called the “New Nine,” joining Neil Armstrong, Frank Borman, Jim Lovell and others.

McDivitt was chosen to command the second two-man Gemini mission, along with White. The four-day mission in 1965 circled the globe 66 times.

Apollo 9's shakedown flight lasted 10 days in March 1969 — four months before the moon landing — and was relatively trouble-free and uneventful.
So McDivitt went into management, first for the Apollo lunar lander, then for the Houston part of the entire program.

McDivitt left NASA and the Air Force in 1972 for a series of private industry jobs, including president of the railcar division at Pullman Inc. and a senior position at aerospace firm Rockwell International. He retired from the military with the rank of brigadier general.