On April Fool’s Day 1969, just months shy of the landing
of Apollo 11, Maxime A. Faget’s secretary telephoned
a handful of Manned Spacecraft Center (MSC) engineers, telling
them to report to the third floor of Building 36. Most wondered
if it was a prank. At 10 a.m. Faget walked in, carrying a
garment bag which held a straight-winged balsa wood plane.
Throwing the glider across the high bay he declared, “We’re
going to build America’s spacecraft. It’s going
to launch like a rocket and land like an airplane.”
And he added, “It’s going to be reusable.”
That model represented Faget’s vision for NASA’s
next major program, which became the Space Shuttle.
Faget built the model at MSC Director Robert R. Gilruth’s
urging. A meeting at the Marshall Space Flight Center to discuss
post-Apollo plans spurred his design. MSC engineers spent
months working on the Shuttle design and configuration. Faget’s
design evolved as the political and economic realities of
the time impacted the original configuration. Approved on
January 5, 1972 by President Richard Nixon—forty years
ago this month—the Shuttle went on to become NASA’s
workhorse for thirty years. MSC, designated lead center for
the Shuttle Program, also managed the Orbiter Project Office
while Marshall oversaw the components that formed the Shuttle’s
stack: the Solid Rocket Boosters, the Solid Rocket Motors,
the Main Engines, and the External Tank. Kennedy Space Center
managed launch, landing, and recovery operations for the program.
Details about the Orbiters and the Shuttle’s major elements
were captured by the JSC History Office for the STS Recordation
Oral History Project in 2010 and 2011. Center Directors, project
and program managers, and engineers involved in the program
provided technical details about the design, development,
testing, processes, safety measures, the accidents, operations,
and retirement of the program.
To read
more about this highly complex program and the stack see:
http://www.jsc.nasa.gov/history/oral_histories/sts-r.htm.
Also, an additional Shuttle series is located at: http://www.jsc.nasa.gov/history/oral_histories/ssp.htm.
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