Celebrating ‘Hampton’s hero’ Chris Kraft, a space pioneer
There are two structures named in honor of Chris Kraft — a small elementary school in Hampton, the city where he was born in 1924, and the massive Mission Control center on the NASA campus in Houston, the adopted hometown where he died in 2019.
It’s a fitting tribute to Kraft that his name would be affixed to a modest building where he grew up (representing his roots) and a spectacular space where he worked (reflecting the breathtaking scope of his achievements). He was a humble man, but it was the best kind of humility — he was never boastful or arrogant, but he expressed obvious pride in his life’s work whenever he was asked to describe it.
Today marks the 100th anniversary of Kraft’s birth. On Thursday the Hampton History Museum will open a new exhibit, “Chris Kraft: Hampton’s Unlikely Space Hero.” Kraft’s children provided the museum with lots of personal keepsakes and family photos that tell the story of how a boy from Hampton would grow up to put men on the moon (and return them safely to Earth).
Kraft graduated from Hampton High School and then Virginia Tech, and he went to work in his hometown at the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics. In 1958, when NACA became NASA, Kraft was chosen to be part of the Space Task Group, a small group of brilliant engineers who would develop the U.S. space program.
His most visible legacy is the Mission Control center, the one that now bears his name at the Johnson Space Center in Houston. When NACA was developing experimental aircraft, the test pilots were at the controls in moments of crisis when their lives were on the line. When NASA shifted to spacecraft that would leave the Earth’s orbit, the astronauts on board were more passengers than pilots. Kraft understood better than anyone else the degree to which they would be relying on the expertise of the men and women on the ground.
An outside tech firm contracted by NASA suggested a small group of engineers in a central location, communicating by phone with the other teams as needed. Kraft immediately knew that this was not sufficient when lives were at stake and decisions had to be quick and precise. He drew up an elaborate blueprint for
Mission Control — a massive chamber where every relevant team would work together to assess and address any issues that arose during a flight. His visionary plan laid out who would be in the room, where each team would be placed, what protocols would be followed in emergency situations, and who would ultimately make the call on a course of action.
In 1965, Time magazine put Kraft on the cover to promote a story about the space program. The article observed: “Behind all of Kraft’s unforgiving perfectionism is always the knowledge that the final decision, the final responsibility, is usually his alone.”
As a reporter, I had the opportunity to interview Chris Kraft on several occasions. Those phone calls were among the highlights of my three decades at the Daily Press. Each time I hung up, I would marvel for several minutes afterward that my job allowed me to call a guy like this at his home and talk with him at length.
I last spoke with him in July 2019. He was 95 and his health had deteriorated, but he was pleasant and engaging and his memory was sharp. He was hospitalized a few days later and died on July 22, two days after the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing that he had helped orchestrate. I may have been the last reporter he ever spoke with. If so, I think he would have appreciated that his final interview was with his hometown newspaper.
He was, after all, Hampton’s hero.