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\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u201cThe group weren\u2019t waiting for long before Max Faget walked into the room. \u00a0Carrying a garment bag, the impish chief engineer, five feet six inches in his bow tie, jumped up on a desk in front of them. \u00a0They had seen this kind of thing before from their boss, Faget was prone to performing handstands whenever and wherever he thought he needed to get the blood flowing to his brain, seemingly unconcerned about his pockets empting noisily onto the floor. \u00a0Standing on the desk, Faget unzipped the bag and pulled out a handmade balsa wood and paper model airplane. Hand-finished spars ribbing the cigar-shaped fuselage and straight wings were visible beneath the model\u2019s translucent pale brown skin. At the front was an upturned snub of a nose; \u00a0at the back a pair of vertical fins mounted at each end of the horizontal tail. It was a shape unfamiliar to those watching the performance, and Faget was keen to explain it to them. \u2018It\u2019s stable in two attitudes,\u2019 he declared in his syrupy Cajun accent. \u2018Zero degrees angle of attack. . .\u2019 \u00a0The designer raised the model in his hand then launched it from on top of the desk, watching it fly gently across the room before skittering over the hard floor. One of the audience retrieved the model and returned it to Faget, So far, so unremarkable. \u2018And,\u2018 Faget continued, lining up his creation by eye before launching it again, nose high and tail low, \u2018sixty degrees angle of attack.\u2019 \u00a0Instead of flying horizontally, nose first, the glider presented its underside to the direction of travel, not so much flying as falling forward through the air. But it was doing so in as settled and undramatic a fashion as it had when it was flying more conventionally. To the gathering of NASA engineers, Faget\u2019s point was clear: this was a winged airplane capable of reentering the atmosphere from space as safely as the blunt-bodied capsules that had so far returned America\u2019s astronauts to Earth. \u00a0\u2018We are going to build the next-generation spacecraft,\u2019 Faget told them.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0The excerpt above is taken word for word from Rowland White\u2019s book <\/span>Into the Black<\/span><\/i> (Touchstone – Simon & Schuster 2016). \u00a0The event described took place on April 1, 1969 placing it three and a half months ahead of the first manned moon landing and the end of the entire Apollo program by some three years. \u00a0It reminds us that NASA was engineering the Apollo program\u2019s replacement craft before Apollo had achieved its primary goal of landing men on the lunar surface. It is in stark contrast to the position we currently find ourselves in as we pay the Russian space agency Roscosmos hefty sums to ferry our astronauts to and back from the International Space Station and have been doing it since the Space Shuttle program ended with the last flight of Atlantis in 2011. \u00a0We are getting closer to having our own man-rated capsules for future crew transfer flights, but whether they come from one of the civilian programs currently working on them (like SpaceX or Blue Origin) or from NASA itself, it seems rather short sighted that we ended the Shuttle program before we had a replacement ready to roll. Be it the politics of the day, the budgetary gamesmanship of our own government offices, or just plain stupidity emanating from too many agencies to point fingers at, the end result is that we are funding a good deal of the Russian space program buying rides to space. \u00a0White\u2019s book takes us back to the very beginning of the Space Shuttle program and pulls no punches in giving credit where credit is due or blame where it is deserved. Max Faget is just one of the many players who are part of the Shuttle story, but he is one of the oddest choices as a driving wheel considering how he felt about returning spacecraft from orbit back in the pre-Shuttle days.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0As the director of Engineering and Development at NASA\u2019s Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston, Max Faget was willing to bet a bottle of whiskey on his statement that, \u201cIn my lifetime, all spacecraft will land on parachutes.\u201d \u00a0Not long after the 1957 flight of the USSR\u2019s Sputnik satellite, it was Faget who championed \u201cscrunching a man into a blunt-bodied capsule\u201d, a simple, lightweight option that would return astronauts to Earth tethered to a parachute for the final descent. \u00a0\u00a0He had, after all, helped develop the Navy\u2019s Polaris missile warheads and those small, blunt capsules were what he knew best. The director of the Manned Spacecraft Center, and Faget\u2019s boss, Dr. Robert Gilruth sat in on some Air Force task force meetings discussing their need for a \u2018space plane\u2019. \u00a0Knowing how Faget felt about the topic, Gilruth suggested that Max give it some thought. <\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0NASA was the big dog in terms of manned space flight in the early 1960s, but the Air Force harbored their own plans for having a space station serviced by some form of space plane. \u00a0Gilruth figured there might be some common ground between the NASA and Air Force plans. He decided that Faget was just the man to sort it all out. He said, \u201cMax, these guys are talking about a crazy thing. \u00a0Why don\u2019t you look at it and see what it\u2019s all about.\u201d Faget responded to the challenge and returned from his fact finding tour with exactly what Gilruth was hoping to hear: \u201cBob, you know it maybe feasible.\u201d \u00a0After testing some preliminary designs with his colleague Caldwell Jones, Faget called the hush hush meeting of engineers who witnessed the lifting body demonstration described in the opening paragraph of this article. \u00a0The Space Task Group had envisioned a permanent orbiting space station, and moon base and a space plane to service them all and Max Faget began laying the foundation to make it all happen. The Air Force, on the other hand, had a different goal and it dealt with reconnaissance from space, not science.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0The Air Force vision of space revolved around the use of satellites to keep an eye on the rest of the world. \u00a0They spent a lot of money and research time on how to take reconnaissance photos from space and return them to Earth. \u00a0There were no options for real time telemetry from space in those early days. They found remote photography could be done, but not with the fast turnaround time needed during the volatile Cold War period. \u00a0They rightly concluded that a Manned Orbiting Laboratory would be the ticket and they began covertly training their own astronauts. The astronauts in training joked that they were always \u2018three years from launch\u2019 as the MOL project time table kept being reset. \u00a0Just about the time the orbiting lab, space capsule, cameras and astronauts were finally coming together, the project was cancelled. New developments in digital components needed for \u2018filmless\u2019 photo surveillance rendered the need for a manned platform moot. Both the digital and manned programs were becoming expensive, so one of them had to go. \u00a0Suddenly, fourteen men who had picked the Air Force program as their ride to space found themselves without any program at all.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Max Faget\u2019s team went into overdrive and as the manned moon landings kept the public entranced, they worked behind the scenes to invent the next-generation spacecraft. \u00a0\u00a0The concept was simple enough: design a reusable vehicle that left Earth like a rocket and returned as a plane. Each design presented different payload capabilities and picking one design that would offer the most mission options wasn\u2019t an easy task. \u00a0One option copied an early Air Force design for a space plane called the DinaSoar that had been scrapped in favor of Faget\u2019s capsule. Faget wanted to see a massive 204 foot long rocket plane that would piggy back the smaller vehicle to an altitude where the shuttle\u2019s own engines could propel it into orbit. \u00a0Faget\u2019s team eventually tried out more than 75 prototype models before settling on the one that dotted the most \u2018i\u2019s and crossed the most \u2018t\u2019s. In the end, the Space Shuttle design we are familiar with (orbiter, large external fuel tank and two solid fuel booster rockets, one on each side) was a trade off between the need for larger cargo space and the kick needed to get it into orbit.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0As for the fourteen MOL astronauts, they investigated various options to continue their flying careers. \u00a0In that the MOL program had been a \u2018black\u2019 or classified exercise, none of the pilots would be allowed to fly combat missions in Vietnam for a two year period to negate the possibility of being shot down and interrogated. \u00a0One of them finally suggested calling NASA to find out if they could continue their astronaut careers there. They were given the grand tour just after the Apollo 10 mission circled the Moon and sent a lunar lander on descent without actually landing on the Moon. \u00a0The chief of the astronaut office, Deke Slayton, informed them that he already had more astronauts on hand than he had rides for. George Mueller, head of the manned space office in Washington, convinced Slayton that bringing in the Air Force guys might curry some favor for NASA within the Air Force. \u00a0Ultimately, seven of them joined the NASA team and were told to find something to do until their time to ride a rocket arrived. Perhaps testing the Space Potty in zero-g conditions aboard the K-135 Vomit Comet* wasn\u2019t glamorous duty, but it kept them in the que for a future ride to space. (*The Vomit Comet was a modified K-135 tanker that would fly large parabolic arcs allowing the astronauts could experience weightlessness for a minute or so as the plane flew over the top of each upward arc – anyone who gets car-sick can vouch for the name).<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0The inaugural Shuttle Flight would be a first for the manned space program. \u00a0It would be the first time a vehicle would not be tested in a full launch before a crew climbed into the seats. \u00a0The lucky crew selected to fly the new bird consisted of NASA veteran John Young and Bob Crippen, one of the MOL astronauts brought into the program at Mueller\u2019s request. \u00a0On April 10. 1981, the first operational flight of the Space Shuttle opened a new chapter in manned space flight. There were highlights (deployment of the Hubble Space Telescope and probes like Magellan and Galileo), lows (the Challenger and Columbia disasters) but for better or worse, the Space Shuttle came closer to meeting the original Space Task Force\u2019s vision than anyone ever expected. \u00a0The Air Force efforts to put a manned observation post in space failed, but one of their astronauts managed to be on the historical first Shuttle flight. <\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0What the public got to see on the TV was a few brave men and women riding fiery rocket trails into space. \u00a0I, for one, am glad that people like Rowland White dig beyond the headlines and evening news and tell us the stories that lead up to the flights. \u00a0They say that history is written by the winners, but there are equal parts of history that are written by those who lay the first blocks of the foundation and then end up waiting until the second story is being constructed before they get to take their shot. \u00a0Having grown up during the golden age when humans were making their first small steps into Earth orbit, the part of the story we witnessed on the evening news was only part of the story. I have never been one to put any credence on the \u2018Moon landings were faked\u2019 stuff, but with the military jockeying for the strategic high ground during the Cold War, it doesn\u2019t surprise me at all that there was a black ops space program being worked on. \u00a0We should be glad others looking forward took great pains to keep the high ground of space neutral territory.<\/span><\/p>\n Top Piece Video – What’s says ‘spacey 1960s’ better than The Byrds ‘Mr Spaceman<\/em>‘?\u00a0 \u00a0<\/span>