Maxime Faget, 83; Helped Get Space Program Off the Ground

Maxime A. Faget, a pioneer of America’s manned space program who put his stamp on the design and function of every spacecraft from Mercury through the space shuttle, has died. He was 83.

Faget died Saturday at his home in Houston, NASA announced. The cause of death was not reported.

Called by some the “Einstein of manned space flight,” Faget was an engineering innovator who played a critical role in fulfilling President Kennedy’s promise to land a man on the moon in the 1960s. In doing so, he wrestled with, and helped solve, such fundamental problems as determining the best capsule shape for bringing humans safely back to Earth from space, as well as the proper design of emergency escape rockets and the lunar modules.

“Without Max Faget’s innovative designs and thoughtful approach to problem-solving, America’s space program would have had trouble getting off the ground,” said NASA Administrator Sean O’Keefe.

“Max Faget was truly a legend of the manned space flight program,” said Christopher C. Kraft, the former director of the Johnson Space Center in Houston. “There is no one in space flight history in this or any other country who has had a larger impact on man’s quest in space exploration.”

Faget was less flowery in assessing his achievements, which he said emerged from a simple, fun-seeking approach to life. “Everything has been a toy with me,” he said in a 1997 oral history interview. “My toys were things that worked, things that flew, dove under the water. I always liked things like that.”

One of the last links connecting the giant modern space bureaucracy to America’s tentative first forays outside Earth’s grasp, Faget joined NASA before it was NASA. By the time he retired in 1981, he had seen America through the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo space missions, and paved the way for the reusable space vehicle known as the shuttle.

To those who knew him well, such as former Aviation Week and Space Technology editor and publisher Robert Hotz, Faget was a “very peppery guy. He was a Louisiana Cajun, very outspoken. He did not suffer fools gladly.”

Though aware of his place in history -- he once told a visiting Russian delegation that they owed him a medal for using his design for the escape rocket that saved a crew of cosmonauts from a fiery death -- he was not self-important. “Feisty is a better word,” Hotz said.

Faget was born Aug. 26, 1921, in what is now Belize. As a child, he and his older brother built model airplanes and submarines. But these were not standard-issue plastic models with glue-on decals. They made submarines with rubber band motors that submerged automatically and resurfaced on their own.

His childhood hobby led him to a mechanical engineering degree at Louisiana State University in 1943. He joined the Navy in World War II and saw action in the South Pacific, once getting pinned down for 20 hours with an overcooked Sunday turkey dinner filling the vessel with rancid fumes. “It got to be pretty smelly,” he said later.

After the war, he joined the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics -- which was later incorporated into NASA -- and was assigned to the Pilotless Aircraft Research Division at Langley, Va. He was still there when, in late 1957, the Soviets inaugurated the space race by launching Sputnik into orbit.

“Of course, that set us all back,” said Faget.

Within weeks, Faget and his colleagues were hard at work discussing the possibility of “rocketing men up into orbital velocity and how to get them back.”

In March 1958, he presented a seminal paper titled “Preliminary Studies of Manned Satellites, Wingless Configuration, Non-Lifting” at a conference at Moffett Field in Northern California. The paper laid out most of the key concepts later adopted by America’s first manned space program, the Mercury project, including designs for a spaceship that could reenter the Earth’s atmosphere without burning up the astronauts, the use of a retrorocket to slow the craft, and the use of parachutes for final descent.

The ground-breaking paper concluded that “as far as reentry and recovery are concerned, the state of the art is sufficiently advanced so that it is possible to proceed confidently with a manned satellite project.”

Faget was one of the original 35 engineers assigned to the Space Task Group to carry out the Mercury project.

“Keep it simple” was Faget’s philosophy behind the light-bulb-shaped Mercury spacecraft, a philosophy he also applied to the two-man Gemini craft. Gemini has been described as a “wingless wonder that can maneuver to an ocean splash down target because it had an ingeniously misplaced center of gravity.”

The task group later developed into the Manned Spacecraft Center that is now the Johnson Space Center in Houston. Faget’s role put him into intimate contact with the original, soon to be much more famous, seven Mercury astronauts, who didn’t always see eye-to-eye with the engineers. “All we are is (sic) a guinea pig,” Faget recalled them complaining when they learned the craft would pilot itself.

“We didn’t know what they’d do when they got up there, how they’d react and all that,” Faget explained later. “They might end up vomiting.”

The astronauts stood their ground. The engineers finally agreed to give them some piloting controls and to put a window in the front of the capsule so they could see where they were going.

After Mercury, and then Gemini, got going, Faget devoted more and more time to heading a design and analysis team exploring manned flight to the moon. Faget was appointed chief engineer at the Manned Spacecraft Center, responsible for design, development and performance of the Apollo spacecraft.

Even before Neil Armstrong stepped onto the surface of the moon in the summer of 1969, Faget was already moving ahead on a new project: designing a reusable manned spacecraft. He worked on the shuttle program until he retired from NASA.

After leaving NASA, Faget was among the founders of Space Industries Inc., one of the earliest commercial ventures into outer space. Several of his experiments, including one testing materials processing in a near vacuum, flew on later shuttle missions.

In his 1997 oral history interview with Jim Slade, Faget said he never lost his love of toys; they just got bigger. “So I think the world will always have men that never grow up, that will do things that didn’t seem to have a hell of a good purpose at the beginning, but turn out to be innovative and useful, for reasons that no one ever dreamed of.”

He taught at several colleges and received numerous awards, including the NASA medal for Outstanding Leadership. He was inducted into the National Space Hall of Fame in 1969.

Faget held patents on the “Aerial Capsule Emergency Separation Device (escape tower),” the “Survival Couch,” the “Mercury Capsule” and a “Mach Number Indicator.”

Faget’s wife, Nancy, died in 1994. He is survived by four children, Ann, Carol, Guy and Nanette. Funeral arrangements are pending.