Maxime Allen "Max" Faget was a Belizean-born American mechanical engineer. Faget was the designer of the Mercury spacecraft, and contributed to the later Gemini and Apollo spacecraft as well as the Space Shuttle.
Maxime Faget
Space shuttle model, created by Faget, April 1, 1969
Project Mercury was the first human spaceflight program of the United States, running from 1958 through 1963. An early highlight of the Space Race, its goal was to put a man into Earth orbit and return him safely, ideally before the Soviet Union. Taken over from the US Air Force by the newly created civilian space agency NASA, it conducted 20 uncrewed developmental flights, and six successful flights by astronauts. The program, which took its name from Roman mythology, cost $2.68 billion. The astronauts were collectively known as the "Mercury Seven", and each spacecraft was given a name ending with a "7" by its pilot.
Wallops Island test facility, 1961
Mercury Control Center, Cape Canaveral, 1963
Retropack: Retrorockets with red posigrade rockets
Landing skirt (or bag) deployment: skirt is inflated; on impact the air is pressed out (like an airbag)