in january 1958, max faget and paul purser had worked out in considerable detail on paper how to cluster four of the solid-fuel sergeant rockets, in standard use at the wallops flight facility in virginia, to boost a manned nose cone above the stratosphere. faget's short-lived "high ride" proposal had suffered from comparisons with "project adam" at that time, but in august 1958 william bland and ronald kolenkiewicz had returned to their preliminary designs for a cheap cluster of solid rockets to boost full-scale and full-weight model capsules above the atmosphere. as drop tests of boilerplate capsules provided new aerodynamic data on the dynamic stability of the configuration in free-fall, the need for comparable data on the powered phase quickly became apparent. so in october 1958, a nasa team prepared new engineering layouts and estimates for the mechanical design of the booster structure and a suitable launcher.