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Wall of Honor Level:
Air and Space Friend

Honored by:
Mr. Leo J. Eiden

David Haynes has been involved with American aviation for nearly a century. He has touched bi-plane and spacecraft. At the age of seven, in 1917, he was entranced by his first vision of a De Havilland DH-4 dropping WWI Bond leaflets. A mere six years later, at thirteen, he flew in a Barnstormer's Curtis "Jenny." During his youth, Dave flew from many of the early airfields in Northern Virginia, including Beacon Field and Bailey's Crossroads, which over time have given way to shopping malls and highways. In 1941, he left his job to join NASA's predecessor, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) as a Designer/Draftsman at the Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory, the Nation's first civilian aeronautics lab. Nearly two decades later (1959) during the height of the Cold War and much Russian Soviet space activity, NACA was designated as the American space agency and renamed NASA. The agency was given a national mandate to put a man on the moon and Mr. Haynes was associated with the NASA "Space Task Group" organized to accomplish this goal. During his nearly forty year tenure at the Langley Research Center, he touched programs to improve aircraft technologies, put men on the moon, explore Mars, and extend man's reach beyond our universe yet not beyond his imagination. His contributions to our nation's aviation and space programs, read like a history of the American program itself. A few of the projects he worked on over his outstanding career include: the "Airborne Trailblazer" program, a series of reentry flights to develop materials for heatshields. "Little Joe" - America's first test rocket designed to test the Mercury spacecraft Launch Escape and Recovery systems; our country's early manned spaceflights - Projects "Mercury" and "Gemini;" "Ranger" - the first U.S. attempt to obtain close-up images of the Lunar surface; "Surveyor" - America's first spacecraft to land safely on the Moon; the "Echo" satellites -NASA's first experimental communications satellite project; and finally, the Mars "Viking" missions 1 and 2 to obtain high resolution images of the Martian surface, characterize the structure and composition of the atmosphere and surface, and search for evidence of life. Although, he formally retired from NASA in 1980, his vision today remains skyward, just as it did nearly a century ago.