Maxime Faget
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Maxime "Max" A. Faget (August 26, 1921 – October 9, 2004) was an American engineer. He was the designer of the Mercury capsule, as well as contributing to the later NASA Gemini and Apollo spacecraft and also the Space Shuttle.
Born in Stann Creek, British Honduras, Faget (pronounced fah-ZHAY) attended community college 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. In 1958, he became one of the 35 engineers who formed the Space Task Group, creating the Mercury spacecraft. He continued to work for NASA until his retirement in 1981, shortly after the second Space Shuttle flight (STS-2). During his NASA career, he contributed to the design of all of NASA's manned spacecraft to date. He held patents on the Mercury capsule and on the escape tower system used on Apollo, which led to the escape system used on Soyuz spacecraft that saved the lives of 3 astronauts in a launch pad fire.[citation needed] Faget also filed a patent for a space shuttle vehicle design in 1972. Faget's design was a fully reusable two-stage winged craft with an orbiter much smaller than the orbiter actually built for the Space Transportation System (STS).
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).
