Aerospace: Mercury's Father

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Just after John Glenn's Friendship 7 plunked safely into the sea, a wiry, inconspicuous-looking man in rimless glasses hustled out of the Mercury control blockhouse at Cape Canaveral to telephone St. Louis. Moments later, 22,000 workers at the McDonnell Aircraft plant laid down their slide rules and wrenches to hear the boss's long-distance words piped over the public-address system. Said James Smith McDonnell, 62: "This is Mac calling all the team!" Then, after exulting over the orbital shot and praising the "great teamwork" that accomplished it, he signed off: "My congratulations to you all."

Calm, blue-eyed James McDonnell likes to backslap "my teammates" whenever he is particularly pleased with some success, and lately he has had frequent occasions to do so. Largely because McDonnell farsightedly started designing space capsules long before Washington asked for them, his company won the coveted Mercury contract, a $130 million program. It has turned out 20 capsules so far, last week was busily mocking up a new two-man "Gemini" capsule that is slated for test flying by 1964. More important for the McDonnell balance sheet, President Kennedy recently requested $1 billion to equip the Air Force with the company's 1,600-m.p.h., all-weather Phantom II fighter-bombers, which can fly supersonically at altitudes from 125 ft. to 98,500 ft.

After 40. All this is the personal achievement of President McDonnell, who waited until he was 40 to launch his own business, has since built it into a debt-free aerospace giant with sales of $344 million and eleven straight years of rising profits, climaxed by last year's $12 million.

Born in Denver and raised in Little Rock, McDonnell learned physics at Princeton and aeronautics at M.I.T. (M.S., '25). After college, he barnstormed the country in flying flivvers of his own design, then settled down to become chief project engineer for the Martin Co. In 1939, ignoring scoffers who said the airframe industry was already overcrowded, he took $30,000 in savings and $135,000 in borrowed money and set up his own twelve-man shop at the St. Louis airport. After learning the ropes primarily as a subcontractor for bigger companies during World War II, McDonnell at war's end delivered the first carrier-based jet fighter —the Phantom I. Since then a $2 billion succession of Banshees, Demons and Voodoos has made McDonnell a perennial contender for the title of world's largest builder of jet fighters.

Unlike most of his competitors, McDonnell leapfrogged missiles almost entirely to concentrate on space. Sputnik's blast-off in 1957 inspired McDonnell to start designing a manned space capsule with company money. More than a year later, when the Government finally asked for capsules, far-ahead McDonnell got the job even though its bid was not the lowest, delivered the first Mercury within 13 months. Haste and continual design changes produced some much-publicized goofs, including loose bolts and floating cigarette butts in the capsules. By riding herd on the program personally, determined James McDonnell cleaned out most of the bugs.