HOUSTON – Mercury capsule designer and human spaceflight architect Maxime Faget has been hospitalized after suffering a heart attack last week.
Faget, 78, remains in a critical care unit at a Houston-area hospital. His daughter-in-law, Suzanne Faget, said he might return home within one week.
He had a profound influence on human spaceflight, from the dawn of the Mercury program through the development of the space shuttle.
In the late 1940s, Faget worked at the National Advisory Committee on Aeronautics Langley Laboratory (NACA) with a group that flew rocket-powered models to obtain data on high-speed flight. Faget developed a ramjet engine that set unofficial speed and altitude records. He also participated in the first round of proposals to develop the X 15 rocket-powered research plane.
In 1957 and 1958, Faget designed and began development of a single seat space capsule. It became the capsule used in Project Mercury that put the first American in space in 1961. Both the Gemini and Apollo capsules were variants on his original design.
When the NACA transformed itself into the civilian space agency NASA, Faget joined the transition team and later joined the Space Task Group organized to manage Project Mercury.
Faget was appointed chief engineer at the Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston (now known as Johnson Space Center) at the start of the Apollo program in the early 1960s
A few months before the Apollo 11 Moon landing in 1969, Faget organized a team to study the feasibility of a reusable spacecraft. Later Faget and his team received funding to develop the
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