Caldwell C. Johnson was a manned spacecraft designer for NASA and contributed greatly 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 NASA 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; he 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.