Apollo: The Race to the Moon (5 page)

The Canadians (as they were known, despite the mix of Scotsmen, Welshmen, Irishmen, and even a Frenchman) never gained much public recognition for their contribution to the manned space program, but to the people within the program, their contribution was incalculable. “They had it all over us in some areas—just brilliant guys,” one of the original Space Task Group engineers remembered. “They were more mature and dignified and they were bright as hell and talented and cordial and professional. To a man.” Glynn Lunney, like many other Americans who were with the Space Task Group, marveled at the serendipity of it all, with the Canadians “washing up on the shores of Langley Field” at the critical point. They were, thought Lunney, “the leavening of the bread.”

When Owen Maynard drove into Langley for the first time, he was still just a young engineer trying to find his way in a strange place. Finally he found his destination, Building 58, tucked in beside the nineteen-foot wind tunnel on Dodd Street. It was a two-storey red brick building with a little portico in front, built back in the 1920s as Langley’s first headquarters and still called the Administration Building. By 1959 it had long since been second-rate space, used for the East Area’s cafeteria during World War II and subsequently for miscellaneous storage and office space. Behind it was Building 104, called the Technical Services Building, said to be the oldest structure anywhere at Langley. Also made of red brick, it was so obscured by its newer neighbors that it was only partially visible from the street. These two buildings constituted the sum total of the facilities of Project Mercury.

Maynard parked his car and went into the Administration Building. The little lobby inside the door was charmingly old fashioned, a small rotunda with painted murals of the history of flight—Icarus, the Wright brothers, and Professor Samuel P. Langley himself. The offices radiated from it, and they too had a certain shabby elegance, with floors of oiled oak and ceilings twelve feet high. But the building was pathetically humble compared to the AVRO facilities that Maynard had just left.

The Technical Services Building in back turned out to be humbler yet. It felt like a worn-out junior high school building, with antique lighting, a roof that leaked during rainstorms, and creaking risers on the old wooden stairs. The nineteen-foot wind tunnel next door made a terrific racket. There wasn’t any air conditioning, and Maynard would soon find that in the heat and humidity of the Virginia summer, he had to take care lest the perspiration from his arms ruin his drawings.

As Maynard looked about and made inquiries and listened to the shop talk, he found that it came down to this: About 140 engineers (including the Canadian contingent), most of them youngsters, with borrowed quarters and a strained budget, were supposed to put a man into space and redeem America’s technological prestige in the eyes of the world. He was still adjusting to this realization when, a few weeks later, he met a strange fellow named Max Faget. Faget, he discovered, was not content with just getting a man safely into orbit in the Mercury capsule. He was thinking about putting a man on the moon.

Chapter 2. “I could picture the astronauts looking down at it with binoculars”

Immediately to the north of the White House stands Lafayette Square, a formal park of grass and trees crisscrossed by brick paths. During the first half of the nineteenth century, when wealthy Washingtonians built townhouses along the three sides of the square facing the White House, Lafayette Square became the most fashionable address in the city. One of these houses still stands at the northeast corner of the square. It is one of the larger houses, washed in a pale lemon, with a handsome bay window overlooking the park. Built in 1820, it was given to the widow of the fourth President of the United States in payment of a debt owed to her husband, and it has been called by her name ever since: Dolley Madison House.

In the spring of 1959, Dolley Madison House was the headquarters of NASA, an organization still so compact that its entire headquarters staff could be housed in that one townhouse and a small adjoining office building on H Street. One spring day not long after Owen Maynard’s introduction to Langley, Max Faget walked up the front steps on H Street and was ushered into the Federalist drawing room that now served as the office of the NASA administrator.

Faget had come up from Langley at Keith Glennan’s invitation to make a presentation to an informal seminar that the administrator periodically convened on an ad hoc basis. “It was almost like a symposium,” Faget recalled, “not to deal with management issues, but more or less to blue-sky things.” Wernher von Braun was attending that day, up from Huntsville. He wasn’t yet part of NASA, but Glennan liked to call on him for advice, and von Braun, who longed to be part of the space program, was glad to oblige. William Pickering, director of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, had flown in from Pasadena. Representing headquarters, besides Glennan himself, were Abe Silverstein, director of Space Flight Programs, and Donald Ostrander, director of Launch Vehicle Programs. It was as august a group as little NASA could assemble.

In 1959, Max Faget was chief of the Flight Systems Division of the Space Task Group—a top position within the Space Task Group, but one that left him far junior to the others in the meeting. Yet Glennan had called him up from Langley, because Glennan had an exotic problem for the group to blue-sky. Already, Max Faget was becoming known in the flight-engineering world as a man who could do that like nobody else.

“Maxime Faget” is a wonderfully felicitous name for a spacecraft designer, calling up an image of some quirky artisan genius at Cartier or Dior—not an inaccurate image for describing the real Maxime Faget. Faget would never be able to compete with von Braun or the astronauts for public recognition, but within the spaceflight fraternity he would acquire a unique reputation. A story is told about a time in the 1970s when a famous author sought out some old-time Langley engineers to ask for their help with a novel about the space program. The famous author had envisioned a central character who was an engineering eminence. The engineer would have graduated with highest honors from Princeton, the nation’s preeminent aeronautical engineering school, and have been a Rhodes scholar at Oxford. Then he would have returned to Princeton, this time to the Institute of Advanced Studies, from which he would become the anonymous genius behind the American space program. Could the Langley engineers think of a person whom the author might use as a model for this character? One of them said yes, we used to have a fellow like that around here. He hesitated. Would it be okay if he was born in British Honduras and got his degree from Louisiana State?

From an old Louisiana family of French extraction, Max Faget was born in British Honduras because his father, an eminent physician in the Public Health Service, was conducting research there on tropical diseases. The young Faget got his engineering degree from Louisiana State in 1943 and went from there to combat duty on submarines in the Pacific. After he was discharged, he and a friend from L.S.U. stopped by to interview at Langley as a lark. Faget didn’t know a thing about aviation, Bob Gilruth remembered later, but “he was bright and he was interested,” and Gilruth was impressed by someone who would volunteer for submarine duty in wartime. So Max Faget was hired, the man who went on to become the principal creative force behind the development of American manned spacecraft from Mercury through the shuttle.

It was not immediately apparent to people who first met Faget that he was a budding legend. “I was being interviewed by a guy about where I’d like to work,” recalled Tom Markley, who went to Langley in 1956. “It was just my first week out of college, and so I said, ‘I don’t know.’ He said, ‘You’ve got a physics background. I think maybe you ought to work for Max Faget.’ I said okay. So he called Max down and pretty soon this little guy in a pair of jeans and a white T-shirt walks in. I thought, what have I gotten myself into?”

At that time, Faget was first making his name in the world beyond Langley as the man who developed the “blunt-body” shape for the Mercury capsule.* It was a considerable triumph. Others, notably at Ames Research Center, had been arguing for a lifting body, a shape with some of the characteristics of an aerodynamic wing. Faget demonstrated that the blunt ballistic shape (he had adapted it from the blunt-body concept used for ballistic missile nose cones) not only would be simpler and faster to implement, an exceedingly important consideration after Sputnik, but also would have enough lift to be maneuverable.

Markley first realized what Faget was up to sometime in 1957, before the Space Task Group was formed. Markley was walking through the P.A.R.D. shop at Langley when he looked up and saw Max, all by himself, standing on a balcony overlooking the shop. He was throwing what looked like paper plates out over the balcony. “I thought he was crazy at first,” said Markley. “I just stood there and looked at him.” He finally walked up the steps to the balcony. As he got closer he could see that Faget had taped pairs of paper plates together, back to front.

“Max, what are you doing?” Markley asked.

“I think these things will really fly. We have some lift over drag in this thing,” Faget answered, as he sailed another pair of plates out over the shop floor. Down on the floor, the shop technicians continued to work unperturbed. They were used to this sort of thing from Max.

Standing only five feet six inches tall, slight, natty in his bow tie when he got dressed up for outsiders, Faget looked deceptively boyish and harmless. This impression usually lasted only briefly, however. “He was opinionated, completely outspoken—he wouldn’t pull back an iota,” said John Disher, who had to deal with him from headquarters. “If you had a dumb idea or he thought you were dumb, he’d tell you to your face.”

Along with that bluntness went supreme self-confidence. “It never occurs to him that he can be wrong,” said his closest collaborator, Caldwell Johnson. “A lot of people have got a great deal of self-doubt, they hesitate to do things, because they’re not all that damn sure they’re right. Max is never in any doubt in his mind whether he’s right or wrong. And that’s good. Goddamn, if you don’t have a few people like that, you’re not going to get anywhere.”

And yet, oddly for a man of such strong opinions and large ego, Faget seems to have been liked by just about everyone who worked with him. “A sweetheart,” said Owen Maynard. “He was always laughing and joking,” said Markley, “a great guy to grow up under.” “Max was a very likable guy,” Disher confirmed. “He just detested higher authority.”

Perhaps the best way to describe Faget’s style is cheerful ruthlessness. His associates recalled knock-down, drag-out technical arguments with him. Faget’s voice would rise, his face would flush—and then it would pass as quickly as a summer storm and Max would be off on something else. The only thing you had to remember when you were around Faget was that once he got absorbed in something, you were well advised to keep a safe distance. One engineer who used to play squash with him in the astronauts’ gym at Houston recalled that Faget would “beat the hell out of you with the racket if you didn’t watch out.” The two men were the best of friends, had been for years—but, nonetheless, “you had to play defensively, because Max didn’t make any effort whatsoever to avoid hitting you. And you’d lose a lot of points that way.”

On the other hand, once Faget’s absorption in something was finished, that was it. He was curiously detached about his spacecraft once they had left his hands. He didn’t go to see them launched. He could have—he was not required in Mission Control the way Operations people were—but he always managed to be too busy with something else. In later years he relented and went to see one of the Apollo launches, but only one. Nor did he change in later years, even after he retired from NASA. Max Faget, the lead designer of the shuttle, as of the end of 1988 had never gone to Cape Canaveral to watch a shuttle launch.

Even when he was in the Control Center, Faget seemed indifferent to the flights. It was an outgrowth of the traditional cleavage of design people and operations people in the world of aviation. “Max completely hated Operations,” one said. Caldwell Johnson explained: “Max always pissed and moaned about the Operations guys—about how you design a good spacecraft, and then they come along and screw it all up. And that’s not so. That’s not so at all. But it’s kind of a built-in professional disagreement.”

Faget seldom bothered with a drafting table. He worked from ordinary coordinated paper, the kind sold at the corner drugstore. And while he knew what all the alphas and epsilons of the engineering world meant, he didn’t start with them when confronting a problem. Once when a visitor asked him whether he was an “intuitive” engineer, he answered, “I think I’m an intuitive engineer, yes. There is such a thing as a talent for things. I think I have a talent for it… . You know, it depends on how you want to use your tools, and how you want to do your analysis. I can almost go in a trance… . I can get fully absorbed in a problem, to the point of almost—well, you really have to distract me to get my attention.”

How long does this last? he was asked. “I don’t know. I really don’t know. Oh—sometimes days and weeks. You can’t stand it but so long. I won’t say a trance—you know, you just stare at the wall. Your brain is working, I know that. It takes energy: You’re tired after you’ve come out of it.”

To his colleagues, the products of Faget’s trances sometimes seemed more like imaginative leaps than solid, precise engineering—one of them used to claim that “Faget” stood for “Flat-Ass Guess Every Time.” But the consensus of the engineers who worked closely with Faget was that his batting average was astonishingly high. “Max had brilliant ideas, and he was usually right,” said John Disher, and that was the way that he came to be perceived throughout NASA. “This country has owed a debt of gratitude to Max for a long time,” maintained Glynn Lunney—an Operations man. Forty years after he was first hired at Langley, a colleague since N.A.C.A. days would describe Max Faget by saying, “The United States could run for the next hundred years on the ideas Max had while he was shaving this morning.”