#mercuryspacecraft

Detail from a recent painting

Maxime Allen "Max" Faget was a Belizean-born American mechanical engineer. Faget was the designer of the Mercury spacecraft, and contributed to the later Gemini and Apollo spacecraft as well as the Space Shuttle. Born in Stann Creek Town, Belize (then known as British Honduras), Faget attended City College of San Francisco in San Francisco, California, and he received a Bachelor of Science degree in Mechanical Engineering from Louisiana State University in 1943. After three years as a submariner in the U.S. Navy, he joined the Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia as a research scientist. While working for NACA at Langley, Faget worked on the design of the X-15 hypersonic spacecraft, at the Lockheed Aircraft Corporation's Skunk Works. In 1958, Faget became one of the 35 engineers who formed the Space Task Group, creating the Mercury spacecraft. Faget based his designs on the aerodynamic work of Harvey Allen from the mid-1950s, and was instrumental in selecting the blunt-body shape that won the Mercury competition over numerous contenders. His design, which he named "DC-3". DC-3 was officially studied by North American Aviation and shown in the press as a baseline contender for the Space Transportation System (STS). North American also studied a version of the same basic system with a much larger 50,000 pounds (23,000 kg) payload. However, the DC-3's nose-high re-entry profile was controversial, and eventually doomed it when the U.S. Air Force joined the Shuttle program and demanded cross-range performance that the DC-3 simply couldn't meet. After his retirement, Faget was among the founders of Space Industries Inc., established in 1982. One of the projects of the company was the Wake Shield Facility, a device to create near-perfect vacuum in space. The WSF flew three times with a Space Shuttle in 1994–96. Faget was inducted into the International Space Hall of Fame in 1969, the National Inventors Hall of Fame, and received the NASA Outstanding Leadership Medal and John J. Montgomery Award. Dr. Faget died of bladder cancer on October 10, 2004, aged 83. #MaximeFaget #mechanicalengineer #Mercuryspacecraft #Belize (at Belize City, Belize)

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