His complete list of professional awards extends to two single spaced pages in his official biography. Faget's name was never kept a state secret, but nonetheless, it remains so unfamiliar to the U.S. public that it might as well have been. Unfortunately, Faget is not the stuff that media dreams are made of. Shy and diminutive, he's possessed of whimsical intonation, an uninspiring appearance, and a predilection for bow ties. So like Korolyov, Faget remained in the background all those years, invisible to the public but indispensable to NASA, while others appeared on magazine covers and TV broadcasts.
Nobody is appointed by the king to be the royal spaceship designer.
His physician father was working in Central America as an employee of the British government after all British physicians had been sent to the trenches in France. Dr. Guy Faget, a noted specialist in tropical diseases, is credited with finding the first practical treatment for leprosy. As a child, Max Faget remembers building lots of airplane models, reading Astounding Science Fiction, and wanting to become an engineer. Faget, the future spaceship builder, initially wound up under water, a junior officer on a combat submarine in the Pacific. With the war behind him and his engineering diploma still fresh, Faget set out for the government's flight research center in Langley, Virginia, to look for a job.