Owen Maynard

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.

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 World War II.

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.

Not long after this, Maynard was transferred to a small team (the Advanced Vehicle Team, led by Robert O. Piland [3]) tasked with developing concepts for possible post-Mercury NASA missions, where he made the initial sketches of a modular, 3-man spacecraft that became the basis for the Apollo spacecraft.

[5] Maynard chose to sleep through the landing itself, so that he could be well rested for the subsequent takeoff (which he felt would be more complex, and require greater concentration on his part).

In 1992, he retired from Raytheon, and he and his wife Helen returned to Canada, where they settled in Waterloo, Ontario, where he died on July 15, 2000.