Scope and Contents

This collection consists of 34 items of manned space flight memorabilia, circa 1950s-1970s, including pencil and ink drawings by Caldwell Johnson from the Mercury, Apollo, and the Apollo-Soyuz programs. This collection also contains papers, reports, and brochures on these three projects, along with design studies for other spacecraft and related equipment.

Biographical / Historical

Caldwell C. Johnson was a manned spacecraft designer for NASA and contributed majorly to the Mercury, Apollo, and Apollo-Soyuz projects. Johnson began his aeronautical engineering career in 1937, when at the age of eighteen he was hired by NACA as a model builder. By 1958, Johnson was the top engineering designer for the Pilotless Aircraft Research Division (PARD). He was at that point recruited for the Mercury program where his job was to put the first design of the Mercury capsule on paper. Johnson is a co-holder of the Mercury spacecraft patent and was the principal architect of the Apollo spacecraft. Johnson was also a member of the Space Task Group (STG), and was the Chief of Spacecraft Design at the Manned Spacecraft Center (now Johnson Spacecraft Center) during the early 1970s. His last project before his retirement from NASA in 1974, was the Apollo-Soyuz Project.