Short answers, pulled from the story.
Maxime Allen Faget was an American mechanical engineer who designed the Mercury spacecraft and contributed to the Gemini and Apollo spacecraft as well as the Space Shuttle. He was born on the 26th of August 1921 in Stann Creek Town, British Honduras, and joined NASA's Space Task Group in 1958 as one of its original 35 engineers.
Faget selected a blunt-body shape for the Mercury capsule based on aerodynamic research by Harvey Allen from the mid-1950s. A blunt body pushes the re-entry shockwave far ahead of the vehicle, directing most of the heat away from the spacecraft's surface. This design won the Mercury competition over numerous contenders.
Faget filed a patent in 1972 for a small, two-stage fully reusable shuttle he named the DC-3 in homage to the Douglas DC-3 airliner, with a payload capacity of around 15,000 pounds. North American Aviation officially studied it as a baseline contender for the Space Transportation System, but the U.S. Air Force's cross-range performance requirement, which the DC-3 could not meet, ultimately ended its candidacy.
Faget led the development of the escape tower system used on Mercury, a mechanism designed to pull the crew capsule away from a failing rocket during an emergency. In various forms, the escape tower was carried forward onto almost all subsequent crewed spacecraft.
After retiring from NASA in 1981, Faget co-founded Space Industries Inc. in 1982. One of the company's projects was the Wake Shield Facility, a device that created near-perfect vacuum in the thermosphere; it flew on three Space Shuttle missions between 1994 and 1996 (STS-60, STS-69, STS-80). He was also a co-inventor on five U.S. patents issued to the company between 1988 and 1992.
Faget received the Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement in 1962, and was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame and the Houston National Space Hall of Fame in 1969. He also received the NASA Outstanding Leadership Medal and the John J. Montgomery Award, was inducted into the International Space Hall of Fame in 1990, and the National Aviation Hall of Fame in 2020.