Owen Maynard
| Owen E. Maynard | |
|---|---|
Owen Maynard when working at NASA in the 1960s
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| Born |
October 27, 1924 Sarnia, Ontario |
| Died |
July 15, 2000 (aged 75) Waterloo, Ontario |
| Occupation | Spacecraft engineer |
| Spouse(s) | Helen Irene Richardson |
| Children | Donald Ross Maynard (Son), Merrill Helen Maynard Marshall (Daughter), Elizabeth Anne Maynard Devlin (Daughter), Annette Kathleen Maynard (Daughter) |
| Parent(s) | Thomas George Maynard (Father), Margaret Arnold (Mother) |
Owen Eugene Maynard (October 27, 1924 – July 15, 2000) was a Canadian engineer who contributed to the design of the Canadian CF-105 Avro Arrow jet interceptor; and NASA's Apollo Lunar Module (LM). Maynard was a member of the group of 32 Canadian and British engineers from Avro Canada who joined NASA when the Arrow was cancelled in 1959. Maynard worked on Project Mercury until 1960 and then moved to the Apollo program. Maynard won a U.S. patent (US3300162) in 1967 for a space station design.
Owen Maynard was born in Sarnia, Ontario on October 27, 1924. He enlisted in the Royal Canadian Air Force in 1942, was trained as a Mosquito pilot, and served in England as a Flying Officer during the World War II. He earned a B.A.Sc. in Aeronautical Engineering, from the University of Toronto, Ontario, in 1951.
After the war, Maynard was employed by the A. V. Roe company, located at what is now Pearson International Airport in Toronto. He began there as a craftsman, and worked on the CF-100 fighter aircraft and the Avro Jetliner. After taking time off to obtain his engineering degree, he returned to A. V. Roe as a designer, eventually rising to the position of Senior Stress Engineer. He spent much of this period carrying out engineering design and analysis for the CF-105 aircraft, the Avro Arrow.
After the cancellation of the Arrow program in 1959, Maynard was one of the group of top Avro engineers who were "loaned" to the newly formed NASA's Space Task Group, in Langley, Virginia, to work on Project Mercury. (Later, after moving to Houston, this group formed the core of what became NASA's Manned Spacecraft Center, later renamed the Johnson Space Center.) Initially assigned to be Project Engineer for the first flight-test Mercury capsule. Among other activities in that role, he participated in the recovery of the Mercury-Atlas 1 capsule from the sea-floor following the failure of its launch vehicle. During the recovery operations, he performed a 30-foot free-dive to find one particular missing component of the capsule. He stated in an official interview that during the subsequent launch failure review process, his post-flight calculations showed the skin of the launch vehicle just below the spacecraft would have buckled, due to the combined drag and bending loads at the max-Q point exceeding the tensile stress in the skin due to internal pressure. Based on that finding, the NASA specified that future Mercury-Atlas launch vehicles add doublers to the skin structure in that area, and that future launch trajectories be shallowed to reduce pitch angle rate, to reduce the bending stress on the launch vehicle. This failure mode did not recur on those subsequent launches.
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