Post by Super Woman on Oct 25, 2004 14:25:26 GMT -5
BELIZEAN SPACE ENGINEER DIES
A Belizean space engineer who has made his mark and etched his name in the history of space travels has passed away at his home in Clear Lake, Texas, after a lengthy battle with bladder cancer.
Maxime “Max” Faget, who began his long career with NASA in 1946, was born in the then small southern coastal town of Stann Creek (now Dangriga) in Belize (then British Honduras) on 26 August 1921. His physician father was working in Central America as an employee of the British government as a Public Health Service physician in the colonial civil service after all British physicians had been sent to the trenches in France. Dr. Guy Faget, a noted specialist in tropical diseases, is credited with finding the first practical treatment for leprosy.
Attempts to trace the family of Faget or anyone elderly person who may have lived in what in now Dangriga in the early 1920s or ‘30s lead to dead ends.
“Max” studied engineering at Louisiana State University in New Orleans. After his academic studies were complete he joined the U.S. Navy as a submarine officer and later became a pioneer engineer at the start of what was regarded as the space race. He was a member of the exclusive Space Task Group of 35 engineers selected by the administration of President Eisenhower in 1958 to launch America’s challenge to the space programme of the former Soviet Union.
This task force was later to be known as the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, the forerunner to NASA and the nucleus of the Johnson Space Center.
He was the chief architect of NASA’s Mercury capsule and a leading contributor to the design of three other man spacecrafts.
This Belizean space capsule designer was also a research scientist in the design of pilotless aircrafts. He developed an expertise in the flying qualities of the blunt nose cones fitted to America’s earliest ballistic missiles. His design was later adapted for use in the progressively more capable Gemini and Apollo spacecraft.
Faget also later developed the space shuttle. He retired from NASA in 1981, after the shuttle’s second mission.
Seeing things from a different angle was strength, and he sometimes made dramatic demonstrations of this. A gymnast in college, Faget liked to leap over chairs in conference rooms or to stand on his head “to improve blood circulation in my brain,” as he put it. With keys and coins falling out of his pockets, Faget would calmly discuss the engineering questions on the agenda.
A former Director of the Johnson Space Center, Christopher Kraft , in a tribute to “Max” Faget said: “There is no one in space flight history in this (USA) or any other country who has had a larger impact on man’s quest in space exploration. History will remember him as one of the really great scientists of the 20th. Century.”
“Max” Faget was 83 when he died last week.
A Belizean space engineer who has made his mark and etched his name in the history of space travels has passed away at his home in Clear Lake, Texas, after a lengthy battle with bladder cancer.
Maxime “Max” Faget, who began his long career with NASA in 1946, was born in the then small southern coastal town of Stann Creek (now Dangriga) in Belize (then British Honduras) on 26 August 1921. His physician father was working in Central America as an employee of the British government as a Public Health Service physician in the colonial civil service after all British physicians had been sent to the trenches in France. Dr. Guy Faget, a noted specialist in tropical diseases, is credited with finding the first practical treatment for leprosy.
Attempts to trace the family of Faget or anyone elderly person who may have lived in what in now Dangriga in the early 1920s or ‘30s lead to dead ends.
“Max” studied engineering at Louisiana State University in New Orleans. After his academic studies were complete he joined the U.S. Navy as a submarine officer and later became a pioneer engineer at the start of what was regarded as the space race. He was a member of the exclusive Space Task Group of 35 engineers selected by the administration of President Eisenhower in 1958 to launch America’s challenge to the space programme of the former Soviet Union.
This task force was later to be known as the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, the forerunner to NASA and the nucleus of the Johnson Space Center.
He was the chief architect of NASA’s Mercury capsule and a leading contributor to the design of three other man spacecrafts.
This Belizean space capsule designer was also a research scientist in the design of pilotless aircrafts. He developed an expertise in the flying qualities of the blunt nose cones fitted to America’s earliest ballistic missiles. His design was later adapted for use in the progressively more capable Gemini and Apollo spacecraft.
Faget also later developed the space shuttle. He retired from NASA in 1981, after the shuttle’s second mission.
Seeing things from a different angle was strength, and he sometimes made dramatic demonstrations of this. A gymnast in college, Faget liked to leap over chairs in conference rooms or to stand on his head “to improve blood circulation in my brain,” as he put it. With keys and coins falling out of his pockets, Faget would calmly discuss the engineering questions on the agenda.
A former Director of the Johnson Space Center, Christopher Kraft , in a tribute to “Max” Faget said: “There is no one in space flight history in this (USA) or any other country who has had a larger impact on man’s quest in space exploration. History will remember him as one of the really great scientists of the 20th. Century.”
“Max” Faget was 83 when he died last week.
