John Finley Yardley

John F. Yardley (February 1, 1925 – June 26, 2001) was an American engineer who worked for the McDonnell Aircraft Corporation and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). He joined McDonnell in 1946, and contributed to the design and development of aircraft such as the McDonnell FH Phantom, F2H Banshee and F-101 Voodoo.

He was the McDonnell project engineer for the Project Mercury spacecraft from 1958 to 1960, and was its the launch operations manager at Cape Canaveral from 1960 to 1964, and its technical director for Project Gemini from 1964 to 1968. In 1968, he became vice president and deputy general manager of the Eastern Division of McDonnell-Douglas Astronautics, and worked on Project Apollo and Skylab.

In 1974, he became NASA's associate administrator for crewed space flight. After the inaugural flight of the Space Shuttle in 1981, he returned to McDonnell-Douglas as president of its McDonnell Douglas Astronautics subsidiary, a position he held until he retired in 1989. He was known for "Yardley's Law": "Pretty is what works", his response to someone who said that the Mercury spacecraft looked like a waste paper bin.

Early life John F. Yardley was born in St. Louis, Missouri, on February 1, 1925, He graduated from high school in 1942 when he was sixteen years old, and was awarded a scholarship to Washington University in St. Louis, where he studied mechanical engineering. Due to World War II, his course was an accelerated one, with four semesters per year instead of the usual two. He joined the United States Navy Reserve, and enrolled in the V-12 Navy College Training Program. In 1943, the Navy sent him to Iowa State College to study aeronautical engineering, which was not offered by Washington University.

Aircraft and spacecraft Discharged from the Navy in 1946, Yardley returned to St. Louis. He married Phyllis Steele, with whom he had five children, four daughters and a son, and took a job with the McDonnell Aircraft Corporation, a local aircraft manufacturer, where he worked as a stress tester. In 1950 he earned a Master of Science degree in applied mechanics from Washington University. He worked his way up to becoming chief strength engineer from 1955 to 1958. Along the way, he contributed to the design and development of aircraft such as the McDonnell FH Phantom, McDonnell F2H Banshee and McDonnell F-101 Voodoo. Yardley was project engineer at McDonnell for the Mercury spacecraft design from 1958 to 1960. He then worked at Cape Canaveral as the launch operations manager for Project Mercury. In this role, he worked on Project Apollo and Skylab.