Maxime Faget holds a position few can claim--spacecraft design engineer. Among his creations are the Mercury capsule, the Apollo command and service modules, and the space shuttle orbiter.

Faget was born in British Honduras. As a child, he read airplane magazines and Astounding Science Fiction, and built model airplanes. Faget earned his B.S. from Louisiana State University in 1943.

Three years later he went to work for the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, later renamed National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). At Langley Aeronautical Laboratory in Hampton, Virginia, he designed ramjets and began a fruitful collaboration with Caldwell Johnson. Faget eventually was assigned to the propulsion-and-performance team that developed the design for the X-l5, the experimental plane that flew Mach 6. The flight of the Russian satellite Sputnik 1 in 1957 challenged Americans to pursue manned space flight. A space craft must protect its occupant from high G (gravity) forces and...