Little Known, but Vital Designer Played Key Roles for NASA

By Bob Granath

Maxime “Max” Faget (pronounced: fah-ZHAY) was one of the most important leaders in the history of America’s space program, but relatively unknown to the general public. He designed the Mercury capsule and was a key contributor to plans for spacecraft flown during NASA’s Gemini, Apollo, and Space Shuttle Programs.

“A Cajun from Louisiana, Faget was known in the space community for his cantankerousness, his eccentricities, his commitment to spacefaring and his genius,” wrote Roger Launius in his 2008 NASA web article, Leaders, Visionaries and Designers. “No one could underestimate his impact on NASA’s engineering culture and pattern of success through more than three decades at the space agency.”

Faget was born Aug. 26, 1921 in British Honduras (now Belize). He was the son of American physician Guy Henry Faget, who revolutionized the treatment of leprosy. The elder Faget demonstrated the efficacy of promin, a sulfone compound that previously was used primarily as an agent against tuberculosis.

Max Faget earned a bachelor’s degree in engineering from Louisiana State University (LSU) in 1943. The decision on his field of study went back to his childhood.

“My brother and I were both interested in model airplanes,” Faget said in an interview for NASA’s Oral History Project inJune 1997. “We were very enthusiastic model airplane builders. When I entered college, I majored in mechanical engineering and minored in aeronautics.”

After graduation from LSU, Faget joined the U.S. Navy during World War II. He served three years as a submariner making two patrols in the Pacific.

Going Faster, Higher, Farther

After leaving the Navy in 1946, Faget was eager to put his engineering degree to work.

“As soon as the war was over, I visited my professor at LSU, and he recommended that I seek a job at the NACA Laboratory at Langley Field,” he said.

The NACA was the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics based at the Langley Laboratory in Hampton, Virginia. Founded in 1915, the NACA’s role was to promote and institutionalize aeronautical research. Faget was assigned as an aeronautical engineer and research scientist.

“A number of advisory groups wanted to go faster than Mach 3, which is the fastest that we’d flown an airplane,” he said. “Of course, that turned out to be the birth of the X-15.”

Mach 3 was three times the speed of sound, or about 2,300 mph.

The X-15’s official world record for the highest speed ever recorded by a piloted, rocket-powered aircraft was set in October 1967 when it flew to 102,100 feet at Mach 6.7 — a speed of 4,520 miles per hour.

On Oct. 4, 1957, the Soviet Union stunned the world when it launched the world’s first artificial Earth satellite, Sputnik. The United States followed with its first satellite, Explorer 1, on Jan. 31, 1958. Soon both nations were considering how to put a man in space.

Designing a Manned Spaceship

The NACA established a group to make human spaceflight a reality. At a conference in March 1958, Faget presented a paper on preliminary studies of manned satellites.

The report included most of the elements needed for a one-person capsule. He explained how a satellite, with the proper design, could follow a planned trajectory and use small thrusters to control the spacecraft in orbit and reentry.

Later that year, President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed the National Aeronautics and Space Act, consolidating America’s civilian space efforts under one agency. On Oct. 1, 1958, NASA absorbed the NACA, its employees and three major research facilities, including Langley.

A team of 35 engineers at Langley formed the Space Task Group with Faget serving as chief of the Flight Systems Division. Their formidable job was to develop the nation’s first human spaceflight program – Project Mercury.

After numerous test flights of the Mercury spacecraft, astronaut Alan Shepard became the first American in space on May 5, 1961. His 15-minute, sub-orbital flight set the stage for a second sub-orbital mission and four flights into Earth orbit.

President John F. Kennedy spoke to a joint session of Congress three weeks after Shepard’s successful flight. He challenged NASA and the nation to commit to “landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to Earth” before the decade was out.

A Bridge to the Moon

Faget and many of his colleagues believed a program was necessary to “bridge” Project Mercury to trips to the Moon.

“Gemini was primarily the result of Bob Gilruth (director of the Space Task Group) insisting with NASA Headquarters that it was essential to have more experience in space operations before we tried flying to the Moon,” said Faget.

During Gemini, missions included astronauts working outside the spacecraft during what came to be known as spacewalks. Two-man crews also spent up to two weeks in orbit, the time for the planned Apollo Moon landing missions.

“Gemini also was designed to be able to make significant translation maneuvers which required the use of a much more powerful auxiliary propulsion system,” Faget said.

This allowed the crews to rendezvous with another spacecraft in orbit. The maneuver was crucial for the lunar modules to catch up with the orbiting command module after landings on the Moon.

Beginning in 1963, the NASA Space Task Group began moving from Langley in Virginia to the new Manned Spacecraft Center near Houston. Following the death of President Lyndon B. Johnson, the center was renamed in his honor. Faget took on the new title of director of Engineering and Development.

Challenges of a Lunar Mission

Faget and his engineering team developed the command/service module for the missions to the Moon. During the first re-entry test of an unmanned Apollo spacecraft, the capsule was driven into the atmosphere at the lunar re-entry speed of 25,000 miles per hour. Everyone in Mission Control, including newly selected astronaut Joe Allen, was elated that the ship had survived the fiery re-entry. Typically, Faget continued intently studying the data.

“Later, I saw him and congratulated him on the successful test,” Allen said.

“Successful, yes,” Faget said. “But the data shows the heat shield is a bit too thick. With the correct design, we could have saved 700 pounds.”

At the beginning of 1967, meeting Kennedy’s goal of landing on the Moon by the end of 1969 was looking like a real possibility.

However, on Jan. 27, 1967, the Apollo 1 crew was aboard their spacecraft at Cape Kennedy Air Force Station for a simulated launch countdown. A fire began in the spacecraft claiming the lives of the three astronauts.

An investigation resulted in significant changes to Apollo.

“I was on the review board after the fire,” Faget said. “We never did find out what specifically caused it. But the real reason it happened is that we had too much flammable material in there, and we had a completely pure oxygen atmosphere. (Subsequently) we had a very extensive program where we tested the flammability of everything that went in there, and we coated stuff with nonflammable materials.”

“When astronauts are in Earth orbit, they can come down easy because all they’ve got to do is slow down a little bit,” he said. “But, when you’re on the Moon, your propulsion system has got to work.”

The propulsion system and all other aspects of the unprecedented flight worked as planned. With the success of two flight tests of the lunar module, Apollo 11 was designated as the first attempt to land during July 1969.

By the end of the following year, Apollo was flying again with plans calling for the crew of Apollo 8 to orbit the Moon 10 times on Christmas Eve 1968. Faget explained that one of the biggest challenges to Apollo was propulsion, the power to travel to and from a destination 234,000 miles away.

Faget joined his colleagues in the packed Mission Control Center in Houston during the tension-filled moments on July 20, 1969 as Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin descended in their lunar module toward the landing site.

“The thing that was in everybody’s mind was ‘If they keep doing this, (hovering) they’re going to run out of fuel,’” he said. “They kept going and going and finally they started descending. It seemed to take an extraordinarily long period. Then they were down.”

There was celebration as President Kennedy’s goal of landing a man on the Moon was achieved before the end of the decade.

But, plans were already emerging for the program to follow Apollo.

A Revolutionary Concept

“George Mueller (NASA’s Associate Administrator for Manned Space Flight) pushed us to develop a reusable spacecraft,” Faget said. “He visualized that we (NASA) really wanted a reusable vehicle which could fly often and could be used over and over again.”

Faget formed a small group at Johnson to look into the feasibility of a completely reusable spacecraft. To demonstrate the revolutionary plan, he designed a straight-winged model with balsa wood and paper. On April 1, 1969, Faget tossed a model toward his team of engineers.

“We’re going to build America’s next spacecraft,” he said. “And it’s going to launch like a spacecraft. It’s going to land like a plane.”

The original design was a small, fully reusable shuttle with a payload capacity around 15,000 pounds.

“It was going to be a two-stage spacecraft with both stages having wings and landing gear and being able to land at an airport and be reused,” Faget said. “That went through a series of evolutionary processes when we began to study the thing and then we got a better idea of the implication of total reusability.”

The initial concept was discarded when the U.S. Air Force began providing requirements to support deployment of larger Department of Defense payloads. The version that was built included an orbiter with a cargo bay that could deliver payloads of up to 60,600 pounds to low Earth orbit.

Faget continued working with NASA until his retirement in 1981. shortly after the second Space Shuttle flight.

The next year, Faget joined others founding Space Industries, Inc. The company made a wide variety of experiment support equipment flown on Space Shuttle missions. One of the projects was the Wake Shield Facility, a test device to create an ultra-high vacuum for materials processing.

Following Faget’s death on Oct. 10, 2004, former astronaut and fellow Space Industries executive, Joe Allen, remembered his foresight and extensive contributions.

“His invention of the Mercury Capsule was already on his colleague’s drawing board just nine months after the launch of Sputnik and still several months before the formation of NASA,” Allen said. “From the very beginning of the Space Age, Max pioneered virtually every American spacecraft involved with human spaceflight.”

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