Penn State Behrend alumnus supported Apollo 13 mission

ERIE, Pa. — In the fall of 1957, David Maynard spread a blanket under the cherry tree in his family’s North East yard, lay back and scanned the sky for Sputnik, a tiny Soviet satellite that would circle the Earth every 96 minutes.

Maynard, then a teen, had long had his eye to the sky. A year or two earlier, he had read an article about the newly developed B-57 bomber and decided he wanted to design airplanes. Sputnik didn’t change his direction so much as confirm it. When the United States launched its own satellite, Explorer 1, a few months later, Maynard watched for that, too.

He enrolled at Penn State Behrend in 1961. He completed one year at the college before transferring to Penn State's University Park campus, as was standard for engineering students at the time.

He earned a degree in aerospace engineering in 1965.

Last summer, Maynard returned to Behrend for a pioneer picnic — a gathering of alumni who graduated 50 or more years ago. He was surprised by how much the college had grown.

“It’s come a long way from when physics and English classes were in Turnbull Hall, and when freshmen and sophomores had tug-of-war contests over the Glenhill pool,” he said.

On the Apollo team

When he graduated, Maynard had job offers from Boeing, Rockwell and NASA, among others. He chose Grumman Aerospace Corp., in Bethpage, New York, where he was assigned to the environmental engineering group for the Apollo Lunar Module.

The group’s job was, in the most literal sense, to keep the astronauts alive. Maynard’s team managed the cabin’s oxygen supply and maintained the water-cooling systems that prevented onboard electronics from overheating. The chain of consequences was direct and unforgiving: No water meant no cooling. No cooling meant no electronics. No electronics meant no communication with Mission Control.

“I was totally focused, 120%,” Maynard said. “It wasn’t a job; it was dedication. We had to be confident enough to go into (the lunar module) ourselves. And we were.”

His team supported the first testing of the complete lunar module at Johnson Space Center in Houston. Every phase required detailed contingency plans — multiple “if this, then this” response paths, which were developed for every foreseeable failure.

“Most of the problems were mundane,” he said. “It was like baking a cake. But you had five or six backup steps for everything.”

That planning proved to be necessary in April 1970, when an oxygen tank on Apollo 13 exploded, crippling the spacecraft just two days into its mission. The crew abandoned the service module and took shelter in the lunar module, which became a high-orbit lifeboat.

Maynard remembers leaving the plant after a normal workday, only to be called back around 10 p.m. as the emergency unfolded. He was one of thousands of engineers — including about a dozen environmental engineers at Grumman — who worked around the clock until the crew splashed down safely six days after launch.

“The euphoria of getting that accomplished … that was something,” he said.

A shift in direction

Soon after, the lunar module program was discontinued. Maynard was among the many aerospace engineers who had to pivot.

He joined GE’s Transportation Division, working on what was then a genuinely novel idea: high-speed passenger rail for the Northeast corridor. The project, informally known as “Make it Run in ’71,” aimed to develop equipment that could travel 100 mph on existing track.

Later, Maynard joined American Sterilizer, taking a position in the company’s research and development (R&D) unit. He became an expert in sterilization at the precise moment the Food and Drug Administration was tightening its requirements for sterile drug manufacturing.

Pharmaceutical companies now had to prove their processes worked — document them, validate them and demonstrate them to regulators. It was exactly the kind of complex, high-stakes technical challenge Maynard liked.

In 1978, he and some colleagues founded Skyland Scientific Services in Bozeman, Montana. The company provided validation and technical services to pharmaceutical, biotechnology and medical device companies. The business grew to more than 50 employees and served upward of 30 clients a year, including Bristol-Myers, Bausch & Lomb, Glaxo and Merck.

Maynard thrived in that environment.

“Validation comes down to demonstrating that a process does what it’s supposed to do, consistently,” he said. “Prove it’s sterile. Prove the equipment works. Prove the whole system holds.”

Moving on

Maynard left Skyland to be a senior pharmaceutical engineer at ER Squibb. It was the first of several moves in the industry: In the years that followed, he built a 60-person validation department at the engineering firm Life Sciences international. He oversaw the full validation of a Glaxo R&D facility in England. He even founded his own consulting firm, Maynard & Associates.

He stepped back from active consulting in 2013. He enjoyed five years of retired life with his wife, Nancy, traveling and visiting their grown daughters and grandchildren, until Nancy's death in 2018.

In 2021, he returned to his hometown of North East. His brother, who had been running the family farm, had died unexpectedly.

“I said, ‘OK, God, what are we doing now? Grapes again?’” Maynard said.

Today, he operates the Maynard grape farm. He remarried, partnering with Pauline, a former classmate.

He is grateful for a long and twisty career path, and for the variety he found in work roles that were built on specific, focused missions.

“I always knew it was time to move on when I felt disappointed,” he said. “When people were no longer doing things the way they needed to be done, that was my sign.”