NOVA; To the Moon; Interview with Maxime "Max" Faget, a mechanical engineer who worked on Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo spacecraft, part 3 of 3

Okay, in the winter of 57, shortly after Russians put there, well, they put a small sputany up an orbit. Then they put a dog in orbit, which really got people excited because they clearly had declared they were going to put men in space. Well, from that time on, we started thinking about first how to get into orbit with people. And secondly, probably as early as the middle of 1958, we're beginning to think of maybe going to the moon. Now, all of this happened during the winter of 57, 58. Congress did not choose NAACA to become NASA

until probably around April of May. And then we knew we were going to become NAACA. So it kind of a blushed over period here. It wasn't a sharp demarcation of NAACA and NASA. When Kennedy said we're going to go to the moon, Max, was there any plan about getting out and walking around? Well, we had thought about going to the moon before Kennedy said so. As a matter of fact, Kennedy actually talked to NAACA and said, have you had any plans to go to the moon? And the answer was yes. We were thinking about it. We were thinking about a rather comfortable program, if you want to put it that way, where we were going to, we were not planning to land on the moon as the first part of the lunar program. We were planning to send men so that they could orbit the moon. First, they would just fly by and then

shortly after that, we would orbit the moon and then we would make some decisions on whether we would land on the moon. And we expected to land on the moon sooner or later because it was so close and because everybody could see the moon. It made a very good target for the next program after Mercury. But mine in those days, we were just beginning on Mercury. We just started that one and we had to get that one behind us before it went any further. But I might say as Mercury developed, our plans became more and more ambitious. And by the time that Kennedy said which was after our first launch, Mercury, the sub-arvel flight that sheifer made, well after that was when Kennedy made the announcement. And then we had a pretty good idea of making a landing and things like that. But they were not worked out in detail. They were just rough plans on how to do that sort of thing.

And I might mention a lot of our thinking changed as we got into the details of the engineering and began to recognize what the problems might be. But we'll get into that. Okay, cut. Yeah, they did contribute. But mine, the capsule was pretty much a going thing by the time the astronauts got on there. And well, I've got to confess, I was on a submarine during World War II. And windows were not on submarines. As a matter of fact, a window represented just one more way in which you get the submarine flooded. So recognizing that glass is not as strong as metal. So we designed the windows rather small. We had two windows, one down on the right and one up here. And the astronauts could look through them, but they had to bend their necks and things like that.

And that was one of the first things they complained about. Now, I also got to tell you that when we designed the Mercury capsule, the first design, the ones with the bad windows if you want to call it that, we were trying to achieve a weight that was no more than 2,000 pounds. And because that's what the Atlas was, we figured the Atlas could carry 2,000 pounds. We hadn't flown it very often yet. You see, we just started flying it. And it turned out that they had more capacity in the Atlas than we originally planned on. So we could accommodate the windows. We could accommodate a lot of changes simply because instead of being able to carry 2.