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

went to see one of the Apollo launches, but only one. Nor did he change in later years, even after he retired from NASA. Max Faget, the lead designer of the shuttle, as of the end of 1988 had never gone to Cape Canaveral to watch a shuttle launch.
    Even when he was in the Control Center, Faget seemed indifferent to the flights. It was an outgrowth of the traditional cleavage of design people and operations people in the world of aviation. “Max completely hated Operations,” one said. Caldwell Johnson explained: “Max always pissed and moaned about the Operations guys—about how you design a good spacecraft, and then they come along and screw it all up. And that’s not so. That’s not so at all. But it’s kind of a built-in professional disagreement.”
    Faget seldom bothered with a drafting table. He worked from ordinary coordinated paper, the kind sold at the corner drugstore. And while he knew what all the alphas and epsilons of the engineering world meant, he didn’t start with them when confronting a problem. Once when a visitor asked him whether he was an “intuitive” engineer, he answered, “I think I’m an intuitive engineer, yes. There is such a thing as a talent for things. I think I have a talent for it… . You know, it depends on how you want to use your tools, and how you want to do your analysis. I can almost go in a trance… . I can get fully absorbed in a problem, to the point of almost—well, you really have to distract me to get my attention.”
    How long does this last? he was asked. “I don’t know. I really don’t know. Oh—sometimes days and weeks. You can’t stand it but so long. I won’t say a trance—you know, you just stare at the wall. Your brain is working, I know that. It takes energy: You’re tired after you’ve come out of it.”
    To his colleagues, the products of Faget’s trances sometimes seemed more like imaginative leaps than solid, precise engineering—one of them used to claim that “Faget” stood for “Flat-Ass Guess Every Time.” But the consensus of the engineers who worked closely with Faget was that his batting average was astonishingly high. “Max had brilliant ideas, and he was usually right,” said John Disher, and that was the way that he came to be perceived throughout NASA. “This country has owed a debt of gratitude to Max for a long time,” maintained Glynn Lunney—an Operations man. Forty years after he was first hired at Langley, a colleague since N.A.C.A. days would describe Max Faget by saying, “The United States could run for the next hundred years on the ideas Max had while he was shaving this morning.”

2
    On this sunny spring morning in 1959, Faget was still just a creative young engineer, and on that basis he had been chosen by Glennan to make a presentation on how a manned lunar landing might be accomplished. “It was the first time I can remember actually considering it,” Faget said later, “and I really hadn’t thought about it very much before the meeting, to tell you the truth.” But the problem seemed fairly straightforward to him, at least in its broad outlines. What you’d want to do, he told his audience, was to take it in stages. “I thought of first flying out and looping around the moon to get a look at it, at least get out of earth orbit and get a look at the moon a little bit closer. I could picture the astronauts looking down at it with binoculars,” Faget remembered, laughing. “Just gonna go whipping on by and come back. The next time, after we got that under our belts, we ought to try to orbit the moon. The nice thing about that would be that you’d be able to fly over possible landing sites and pick one out from your reconnaissance photographs.”
    Finally, on a third mission, Faget told the group, the spacecraft would go into lunar orbit and check out the landing site “just like anybody that flies over a new field before they land on it. And then you would go down and land, one or two orbits