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and professional. To a man.” Glynn Lunney, like many other Americans who were with the Space Task Group, marveled at the serendipity of it all, with the Canadians “washing up on the shores of Langley Field” at the critical point. They were, thought Lunney, “the leavening of the bread.”
    When Owen Maynard drove into Langley for the first time, he was still just a young engineer trying to find his way in a strange place. Finally he found his destination, Building 58, tucked in beside the nineteen-foot wind tunnel on Dodd Street. It was a two-storey red brick building with a little portico in front, built back in the 1920s as Langley’s first headquarters and still called the Administration Building. By 1959 it had long since been second-rate space, used for the East Area’s cafeteria during World War II and subsequently for miscellaneous storage and office space. Behind it was Building 104, called the Technical Services Building, said to be the oldest structure anywhere at Langley. Also made of red brick, it was so obscured by its newer neighbors that it was only partially visible from the street. These two buildings constituted the sum total of the facilities of Project Mercury.
    Maynard parked his car and went into the Administration Building. The little lobby inside the door was charmingly old fashioned, a small rotunda with painted murals of the history of flight—Icarus, the Wright brothers, and Professor Samuel P. Langley himself. The offices radiated from it, and they too had a certain shabby elegance, with floors of oiled oak and ceilings twelve feet high. But the building was pathetically humble compared to the AVRO facilities that Maynard had just left.
    The Technical Services Building in back turned out to be humbler yet. It felt like a worn-out junior high school building, with antique lighting, a roof that leaked during rainstorms, and creaking risers on the old wooden stairs. The nineteen-foot wind tunnel next door made a terrific racket. There wasn’t any air conditioning, and Maynard would soon find that in the heat and humidity of the Virginia summer, he had to take care lest the perspiration from his arms ruin his drawings.
    As Maynard looked about and made inquiries and listened to the shop talk, he found that it came down to this: About 140 engineers (including the Canadian contingent), most of them youngsters, with borrowed quarters and a strained budget, were supposed to put a man into space and redeem America’s technological prestige in the eyes of the world. He was still adjusting to this realization when, a few weeks later, he met a strange fellow named Max Faget. Faget, he discovered, was not content with just getting a man safely into orbit in the Mercury capsule. He was thinking about putting a man on the moon.
    Chapter 2. “I could picture the astronauts looking down at it with binoculars”
    Immediately to the north of the White House stands Lafayette Square, a formal park of grass and trees crisscrossed by brick paths. During the first half of the nineteenth century, when wealthy Washingtonians built townhouses along the three sides of the square facing the White House, Lafayette Square became the most fashionable address in the city. One of these houses still stands at the northeast corner of the square. It is one of the larger houses, washed in a pale lemon, with a handsome bay window overlooking the park. Built in 1820, it was given to the widow of the fourth President of the United States in payment of a debt owed to her husband, and it has been called by her name ever since: Dolley Madison House.
    In the spring of 1959, Dolley Madison House was the headquarters of NASA, an organization still so compact that its entire headquarters staff could be housed in that one townhouse and a small adjoining office building on H Street. One spring day not long after Owen Maynard’s introduction to Langley, Max Faget walked up the front steps on H Street and was ushered into the Federalist