Exploring the Unknown: Selected Documents in ... - The Black Vault

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First Steps into Space: Projects Mercury and Gemini
3.The assignment of the direction of the manned satellite program to NASA
would be consistent with the President’s message to Congress and with the pertinent
extracts from the National Aeronautics and Space Act of 1958 given in the
appendix to this memorandum.
Attachment [not included]
Hugh L. Dryden
Director
National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics
Document I-9
Document Title: Maxime A. Faget, Benjamine J. Garland, and James J. Buglia,
Langley Aeronautical Laboratory, NACA, “Preliminary Studies of Manned
Satellites,” 11 August 1958.
Source: Folder 18674, NASA Historical Reference Collection, NASA History
Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington DC.
Prior to the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programs of the 1960s, virtually everyone involved
in space advocacy envisioned a future in which humans would venture into space aboard
winged, reusable vehicles. That was the vision from Hermann Oberth in the 1920s through
Wernher von Braun in the 1950s to the U.S. Air Force’s X-20 Dyna-Soar program in the
early 1960s. Because of the pressure of the Cold War, NASA chose to abandon that approach
to space access in favor of ballistic capsules that could be placed atop launchers developed
originally to deliver nuclear warheads to the Soviet Union. This memorandum states the
position, one NASA eventually adopted, that advocated using ballistic capsules for human
spaceflight. Led by Maxime A. Faget, one of the most innovative thinkers in NACA/NASA,
the authors contend that because of the desire to launch humans as soon as possible, moving
to a capsule concept represented the only genuine option available for the U.S. A capsule
could make use of research on reentry undertaken for ballistic missiles, as well as make possible
the ready adoption of ballistic missiles as launchers for spaceflight.
[CONFIDENTIAL] {DECLASSIFIED}
NACA
RESEARCH MEMORANDUM
PRELIMINARY STUDIES OF MANNED SATELLITES
WINGLESS CONFIGURATION: NONLIFTING
By Maxime A. Faget, Benjamine J. Garland, and James J. Buglia
Langley Aeronautical Laboratory
Langley Field, VA.
August 11, 1958