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going to contract out much of its work. And it was going to abandon airplanes, the only proper flying machine for a Langley engineer to work on. The Space Task Group was going to do something that had never been done before.
    Glynn Lunney later realized that the ignorance of these early days was bliss. “A lot of the senior engineers thought the project was crazy, and they were knowledgeable enough in the ways of the world to ask whether they wanted to risk their reputations,” Lunney recalled. “I fortunately was unknowledgeable in the ways of the world and said, ‘Gee, that looks like it would be a hell of a lot of fun to me—let’s go do that!’”
    Jack Kinzler reacted the same way. In the year before the Space Task Group was formed, Kinzler, one of the master craftsmen in whom Langley took so much pride, had begun to get excited about space. Wernher von Braun had come up from Huntsville to Langley and given a talk about space flight. P.A.R.D. had given some in-house seminars. “I got so consumed with space I was just waiting for somebody to initiate an actual program,” Kinzler said later. “So when I was asked to join the Task Group with Bob, I said I would drop anything to do that.” As the word spread, Kinzler was overrun with applicants. “I’d have fellows come up to me and say, ‘I want to go with you, Jack, I’ve been reading about it, I’ve been hearing about it.’ So I got the dedicated guys who read all the space magazines and cared about the program.”
    Sometimes, it wasn’t such a calculated decision. The workload facing the Space Task Group was so overwhelming that it exerted a kind of gravitational pull. John Mayer, one of the original forty-five, had formerly been part of the Aircraft Loads Branch, along with Carl Huss and Ted Scopinski, who weren’t. But no more than a week after the Space Task Group had been formed, Mayer was back visiting the Aircraft Loads Lab in the West Area, asking his friends to do some computer runs for him. The branch chief of Aircraft Loads said okay, Carl and Ted could bootleg a little work to help out Johnny. And within another two weeks, Huss and Scopinski were doing more work for Mayer than they were for Aircraft Loads. “Ted and I sat across from each other at the same desk,” Huss recalled. “One day we looked at each other and asked why we didn’t transfer over to the Space Task Group. So we did.”
    The first group was young and enthusiastic, but it was also tiny for such an ambitious project. By February 1959, the original forty-five had grown to just over a hundred people, and yet they were supposed to put a man into space. Moreover, “there was this gap,” as Lunney put it. “We had these super generals and these super privates who were learning how to be corporals. But we didn’t have a hell of a lot of guys in between.”
    And that’s where Owen Maynard came in. In the spring of 1959, as the Space Task Group’s burden was threatening to overwhelm it, the Canadian government unintentionally gave the American space program its luckiest break since Wernher von Braun had surrendered to the Americans.

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    For several years, the Canadian aircraft corporation A.V. Roe, known as AVRO, had been designing and building what was expected to be the most advanced interceptor in the NATO inventory: a long-range, all-weather, fly-by-wire aircraft with an initial combat speed of Mach 1.5, to be increased eventually to Mach 3.0. The plane was called the Arrow, known to the engineers as the C.F.-105. A prototype had flown its first test flights in October 1958. By February 1959, the Arrow had reached a speed of nearly Mach 2.1 and was within a few more test flights of setting several world’s records. But then the Conservative Party under John Diefenbaker won a parliamentary majority and replaced the Liberal government. The new government decided to cancel the Arrow. The decision was announced in Parliament on February 20, 1959, at eleven in the morning.