Maxime Faget

Maxime A. Faget ( born August 26, 1921 in Stann Creek, British Honduras; † 9 October 2004 in Houston, Texas) was an American NASA aerospace engineer who has all his life worked on every manned space project, the NASA into life has launched. He developed the spacecraft of the Mercury mission.

Biography

Faget attended junior college in San Francisco, California. He received in 1943 a Bachelor of Science degree in Mechanical Engineering from the State University in Louisiana. He then served three years on a submarine in the U.S. Navy.

In 1946 he joined the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics ( NACA ) at, from the 1958 NASA should emerge. In the NACA Faget worked at Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia. His field of work included the development of rocket-powered aircraft models for the study of aerodynamics at very high speeds. One of these aircraft reached in 1950 a height of over 19 km and a speed of Mach 3.2. He was also involved in the concept development of the X -15 aircraft and the design of the Polaris missile.

From 1957 Faget designed a spaceship for manned space travel from the later, the Mercury spacecraft was built. When the NACA burst into NASA, Faget was a member of the Space Task Group (STG ), whose main task was the Mercury project. Later he was responsible for the design, development and testing of spacecraft in NASA. This then also included the Gemini and Apollo spacecrafts.

Starting April 1969 he conducted feasibility studies for a reusable space shuttle, from the space shuttle was born. Faget joined 1981, after the second space flight of the shuttle from NASA from.

The following year he founded together with some businessmen one of the first private aerospace companies of the United States, the Space Industries, Inc. One of the products of the company where he worked, was the Wake Shield Facility, an apparatus with which to produce a high vacuum in the weightlessness can. The Wake Shield Facility flew three times on the Space Shuttle from 1994 to 1996 (when the missions STS -60, STS -69 and STS -80).

Faget died on 9 October 2004 at his home in Houston, Texas. His wife Nancy died in 1994. He left three daughters, one son and ten grandchildren.