Apollo: The Race to the Moon by Charles Murray, Catherine Bly Cox Read Free Book Online

drawing room that now served as the office of the NASA administrator.
    Faget had come up from Langley at Keith Glennan’s invitation to make a presentation to an informal seminar that the administrator periodically convened on an ad hoc basis. “It was almost like a symposium,” Faget recalled, “not to deal with management issues, but more or less to blue-sky things.” Wernher von Braun was attending that day, up from Huntsville. He wasn’t yet part of NASA, but Glennan liked to call on him for advice, and von Braun, who longed to be part of the space program, was glad to oblige. William Pickering, director of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, had flown in from Pasadena. Representing headquarters, besides Glennan himself, were Abe Silverstein, director of Space Flight Programs, and Donald Ostrander, director of Launch Vehicle Programs. It was as august a group as little NASA could assemble.
    In 1959, Max Faget was chief of the Flight Systems Division of the Space Task Group—a top position within the Space Task Group, but one that left him far junior to the others in the meeting. Yet Glennan had called him up from Langley, because Glennan had an exotic problem for the group to blue-sky. Already, Max Faget was becoming known in the flight-engineering world as a man who could do that like nobody else.

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    “Maxime Faget” is a wonderfully felicitous name for a spacecraft designer, calling up an image of some quirky artisan genius at Cartier or Dior—not an inaccurate image for describing the real Maxime Faget. Faget would never be able to compete with von Braun or the astronauts for public recognition, but within the spaceflight fraternity he would acquire a unique reputation. A story is told about a time in the 1970s when a famous author sought out some old-time Langley engineers to ask for their help with a novel about the space program. The famous author had envisioned a central character who was an engineering eminence. The engineer would have graduated with highest honors from Princeton, the nation’s preeminent aeronautical engineering school, and have been a Rhodes scholar at Oxford. Then he would have returned to Princeton, this time to the Institute of Advanced Studies, from which he would become the anonymous genius behind the American space program. Could the Langley engineers think of a person whom the author might use as a model for this character? One of them said yes, we used to have a fellow like that around here. He hesitated. Would it be okay if he was born in British Honduras and got his degree from Louisiana State?
    From an old Louisiana family of French extraction, Max Faget was born in British Honduras because his father, an eminent physician in the Public Health Service, was conducting research there on tropical diseases. The young Faget got his engineering degree from Louisiana State in 1943 and went from there to combat duty on submarines in the Pacific. After he was discharged, he and a friend from L.S.U. stopped by to interview at Langley as a lark. Faget didn’t know a thing about aviation, Bob Gilruth remembered later, but “he was bright and he was interested,” and Gilruth was impressed by someone who would volunteer for submarine duty in wartime. So Max Faget was hired, the man who went on to become the principal creative force behind the development of American manned spacecraft from Mercury through the shuttle.
    It was not immediately apparent to people who first met Faget that he was a budding legend. “I was being interviewed by a guy about where I’d like to work,” recalled Tom Markley, who went to Langley in 1956. “It was just my first week out of college, and so I said, ‘I don’t know.’ He said, ‘You’ve got a physics background. I think maybe you ought to work for Max Faget.’ I said okay. So he called Max down and pretty soon this little guy in a pair of jeans and a white T-shirt walks in. I thought, what have I gotten myself into?”
    At that time, Faget was