Maxime Faget, 83; Pioneering Aerospace Engineer Designed Mercury Capsule
By MARGALIT FOX
Published: October 12, 2004
Maxime A. Faget, a pioneering aerospace engineer whose design of the original Mercury space capsule ushered the United States into the age of manned space flight, died on Saturday at his home in Houston. He was 83.
NASA announced the death, which came just five days after that of Gordon Cooper, one of the seven original Mercury astronauts.
Besides working on the Mercury program, Mr. Faget (pronounced fah-ZHAY), contributed to the design of every manned spacecraft that followed, from Gemini and Apollo to the space shuttle, in his 35 years with NASA.
''Max Faget was a truly essential genius of the early U.S. space program,'' Andrew Chaikin, a science journalist who is preparing to write a biography of Mr. Faget, said in a telephone interview. ''The kind of outside-the-box thinking that we associate with breakthroughs was really his hallmark.''
That thinking was nowhere more evident than in Mr. Faget's design of the Mercury capsule, with its iconic -- and iconoclastic -- blunt-nose shape. With that shape, Mr. Faget solved one of the thorniest problems for late-1950's engineers eager to put a man into space: how to protect the craft and its occupant from the severe hazards of re-entry into the earth's atmosphere.
Writing in an Op-Ed piece in The New York Times last year after the Columbia space shuttle broke apart, Kristen C. Stoever, a daughter of the Mercury astronaut Scott Carpenter, explained the problem this way: ''While Wernher von Braun designed rockets to take men into space, it was Max Faget who concerned himself with the trip home, one in which astronauts would scrape against the atmosphere at 17,000 miles per hour in craft that would reach temperatures of close to 4,000 degrees Fahrenheit.''
At the time, the conventional wisdom among Mr. Faget's colleagues called for a needle-nosed spaceship, to offer as little air resistance as possible. Mr. Faget, drawing on aerodynamic principles established by the scientist Harvey Allen, designed a craft that looked, Mr. Chaikin said, ''more like an inverted Styrofoam coffee cup with a saucer-shaped lid,'' which re-entered the atmosphere blunt end first. This blunt-bodied design became an integral, and instantly recognizable, feature of Mercury, Gemini and Apollo spacecraft, as well as of the Soviet Soyuz craft.
''The genius of it was that instead of trying to withstand the heat, this blunt shape created a shock wave which would deflect most of the heat away from the capsule,'' Mr. Chaikin said.
On May 5, 1961, Mr. Faget's craft carried the first American in space, Alan B. Shepard Jr., on a flight of 15 minutes and 28 seconds. The next year, John Glenn became the first American to orbit the earth, also in a Mercury capsule.
Mr. Faget, who with several colleagues held the patent for the design of the Mercury capsule, also created the craft's form-fitting ''survival couch,'' which helped astronauts withstand the gravitational forces of launching and re-entry. In addition, he designed the escape tower used on the Mercury and Apollo craft, which was credited with saving the lives of two Soviet astronauts in 1983 when their launching pad caught fire just before takeoff.
Maxime Allan Faget was born on Aug. 26, 1921, in British Honduras, now Belize. His father, Dr. Guy Faget, was a prominent tropical-disease specialist, credited with discovering an early drug treatment for leprosy. Maxime grew up reading science fiction novels and building model airplanes, and in 1943 earned a bachelor's degree in engineering from Louisiana State University.
After serving as a United States Navy submariner in World War II, Mr. Faget joined the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, the forerunner of NASA, in 1946, working on the design of supersonic aircraft. In 1958, he became part of the organization's Space Task Group, which would later become NASA's Johnson Space Center.
One of the original group of 35 engineers assigned to the Mercury project, Mr. Faget later led the initial teams that studied the feasibility of flights to the Moon and of a reusable spacecraft, which would be realized as the space shuttle. He was inducted into the National Space Hall of Fame in 1969 and the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2003.
After leaving NASA in 1981, Mr. Faget started Space Industries, one of the earliest private space companies. The company's chief project, a small orbiting platform called an ''industrial space facility,'' which would allow the production of goods like pharmaceuticals and electrical crystals to be carried out in space, was never realized commercially.
Mr. Faget's wife, Nancy, died in 1994. He is survived by three daughters, Ann, Carol and Nanette; a son, Guy; and 10 grandchildren.
Photo: Maxime A. Faget (Photo by NASA)