Maxime Faget

• 1. Introduction

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  Maxime Allen Faget was the engineer who decided that a spacecraft returning from orbit should look nothing like an aircraft. That single, counterintuitive choice shaped every American crew vehicle that followed. Faget, whose surname is pronounced fah-ZHAY, was born on the 26th of August 1921 in Stann Creek Town, British Honduras, the place now known as Dangriga, Belize. His family carried a deep tradition of medicine: his father, Guy Henry Faget, was a doctor, and so was his great-grandfather Jean Charles Faget, another prominent physician. Max Faget chose a different path. He studied mechanical engineering at City College of San Francisco and earned his degree from Louisiana State University in 1943.

  From that degree forward, his career unfolded across the most consequential decades of American spaceflight. He helped shape the capsule that first put Americans in orbit, the spacecraft that carried astronauts to the Moon, and the winged vehicle that flew for three decades afterward. He also filed a patent for a shuttle design of his own, one that almost was. How a mechanical engineer from British Honduras became the principal architect of the Mercury spacecraft, and why the blunt body he championed over every rival design proved so durable, is a story worth hearing.

• 2. Blunt Bodies and Mercury

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  In 1958, Faget was one of exactly 35 engineers who came together to form the Space Task Group, the small team charged with creating the Mercury spacecraft from nothing. He brought with him work he had been doing at Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, where he had joined after three years as a submariner in the U.S. Navy. At Langley he worked on the X-15 hypersonic spacecraft, which gave him a firm grounding in the physics of high-speed flight.

  His choice of capsule shape drew on aerodynamic research conducted by Harvey Allen in the mid-1950s. Allen's work showed that a blunt body, rather than a streamlined one, was actually safer for re-entry. A blunt shape pushes a shockwave far ahead of the vehicle, keeping most of the re-entry heat away from the surface. Faget became the person who insisted on that shape when it competed against numerous contenders in the Mercury competition, and that insistence proved decisive.

  He also led the design of the escape tower system mounted on top of Mercury. That tower could pull a crew capsule away from a failing rocket in an emergency. It was used on Mercury in various forms, and then carried forward onto almost every crewed spacecraft that came after. The Gemini and Apollo vehicles both shared significant design points with Mercury, a lineage that Faget helped draw directly.

• 3. The DC-3 Shuttle Design

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  In 1972, Faget filed a patent for a space shuttle vehicle he named the DC-3, a deliberate tribute to the legendary Douglas DC-3 airliner. The name carried a quiet ambition: just as the original DC-3 transformed commercial aviation through reliability and economy, Faget's shuttle was meant to make spaceflight routine. His design was a small, two-stage fully reusable vehicle with a payload capacity of around 15,000 pounds.

  North American Aviation conducted an official study of the DC-3 as a baseline contender for the Space Transportation System, and the design appeared in the press as a serious candidate. North American also examined a scaled-up variant of the same basic concept, one capable of lifting around 50,000 pounds. For a time the DC-3 was a genuine competitor.

  Its undoing was a question of geometry. The DC-3's re-entry profile required the nose to be held high, and that configuration limited how far sideways the vehicle could maneuver during its glide back to Earth. When the U.S. Air Force joined the Shuttle program, it demanded cross-range performance, meaning the ability to land far from the point directly below the re-entry track. The DC-3 could not deliver that, and the design was set aside. What it left behind was clarity: the exercise precisely mapped out the trade-offs that any reusable spacecraft would have to navigate, a contribution that shaped the decisions made on the design that was eventually built.

• 4. After NASA

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  Faget reached the rank of Director of Engineering and Development at the Manned Spacecraft Center in 1962, a position he held as NASA moved through Gemini, Apollo, and into the Shuttle era. He stayed with the agency until 1981, retiring shortly after the second Space Shuttle flight, STS-2.

  The transition to private industry came quickly. In 1982, Faget was among the founders of Space Industries Inc. One of the company's projects was a device called the Wake Shield Facility, an object engineered to generate near-perfect vacuum conditions in the thermosphere by riding in the wake of a Space Shuttle. The physics behind it: the shuttle's passage through the thin upper atmosphere creates a bubble of even thinner gas behind it, a region clean enough for certain manufacturing processes.

  The Wake Shield Facility flew on three separate shuttle missions between 1994 and 1996, specifically STS-60, STS-69, and STS-80. Faget was also a co-inventor on five United States patents issued to Space Industries between 1988 and 1992, covering systems for docking, modular spacecraft configuration, and structural latching mechanisms. After his death from bladder cancer on the 9th of October 2004 at age 83, the private spaceflight organization Copenhagen Suborbitals began developing a piloted spacecraft called the MAX-1 in his honor, though the project was later halted over concerns about the effects of rapid acceleration on humans in a standing position.

• 5. Recognition and Legacy

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  In 1962, the American Academy of Achievement gave Faget its Golden Plate Award. That recognition came the same year he moved into his senior directorship at the Manned Spacecraft Center, a convergence that reflects how quickly his reputation had grown from the Mercury work.

  His inductions followed over the next decades. The National Inventors Hall of Fame inducted him in 1969, the same year he entered the Houston National Space Hall of Fame. The International Space Hall of Fame added him in 1990. The National Aviation Hall of Fame waited until 2020, more than fifteen years after his death, to include him. He also received the NASA Outstanding Leadership Medal and the John J. Montgomery Award.

  The blunt-body capsule Faget championed in the Mercury competition still defines the shape of crewed spacecraft returning from orbit. NASA's Orion capsule, designed to carry astronauts beyond low Earth orbit, uses the same fundamental geometry that Harvey Allen theorized in the mid-1950s and that Faget fought to build in 1958.