Black Zones
Wayne Hale’s NASA Blog: Black Zones
“In the 1950’s it seemed like almost all of our rockets exploded during the launch. There were a lot of spectacular failures in those days and successes seemed rare. As we considered putting a man in a capsule on top of one of those rockets it was obvious that something was needed to get the pilot out of a bad situation in a hurry. During the Gemini program, that method of “crew escape” consisted of ejection seats which were only slightly modified from those found in that era’s military jet fighter aircraft. This left a lot to be desired as we shall see. But Max Faget, the innovative genius behind much of the engineering progress in NASA’s early days, had a brilliant idea. He invented something called the launch escape rocket system.”