Maxime Faget

Maxime Allen "Max" Faget (pronounced fé- GIT; August 26, 1921 – October 10, 2004) 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.

Life
Faget was the son of Guy Henry Faget, and great-grandson of Jean Charles Faget. 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 Corporations 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. Faget also led the development of the escape tower system used on Mercury, which was used in various forms on almost all following manned spacecraft. Faget also worked on the Gemini and Apollo vehicles, which shared many design points with the Mercury.

Faget filed a patent for a space shuttle vehicle design in 1972. His design, which he named "DC-3" in homage to the famed Douglas DC-3 airliner, was a small two-stage fully reusable shuttle with a payload capacity around 15000 lb. 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 50000 lb 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. In the end, its most lasting contribution was to clearly identify the trade-offs inherent in any reusable design.

In 1962 he became the Director of Engineering and Development at the Manned Spacecraft Center and continued to work for NASA until his retirement in 1981, shortly after the second Space Shuttle flight (STS-2). 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 (STS-60, STS-69, STS-80).

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.

Patents
Max Faget was a co-inventor on five United States patents issued to Space Industries, Inc. between 1988 and 1992. The patents, which are listed below, can be found at the USPTO's public web site. PAT. NO.	Title
 * 5,104,070	Structural latch for vehicle coupling mechanisms
 * 4,903,919	Apparatus and method for docking spacecraft
 * 4,834,325	Modular spacecraft system
 * 4,747,567	Spacecraft with articulated solar array
 * 4,728,061	Spacecraft operable in two alternative flight modes'''

MAX-1 spacecraft
The private spaceflight organization Copenhagen Suborbitals has named its next piloted spacecraft after Faget, the MAX-1.