Legendary NASA flight director put ‘control’ in Mission Control
Christopher C. Kraft Jr. — NASA’s first flight director and a legendary scientist who helped build the nation’s space program — died Monday, just two days after the world celebrated the historic Apollo 11 walk on the moon. He was 95.
“#RIP Dr. Christopher Kraft,” former astronaut Clayton Anderson posted on Twitter about 3:30 p.m. Monday. “You were a true leader for this nation and our world. … Godspeed and thank you.”
Kraft’s name is emblazoned in bold letters on the side of the Mission Control building at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, home to the base of operations where Kraft guided astronauts from launch to landing as the organization grew to a full-blown agency that required multiple flight directors to oversee a mission.
The late Apollo 11 astronaut Neil Armstrong once said Kraft was “the ‘control’ in mission control.”
In an interview in February with the Houston Chronicle, Kraft said he never wanted to be an astronaut.
“I liked my job better than theirs,” he said. “I got to go on every flight, and besides that, I got to tell them what to do.”
During an era with no calculators and only rudimentary computers, Kraft essentially built NASA’s Mission Control to manage human operations in space. As the agency’s sole flight director, with a simple black-and-white monitor and listening to eight different communications loops, he had the final say for NASA’s first five manned missions, including the Mercury flights of Alan Shepard and John Glenn.
As NASA scrambled to catch the Soviet Union in space during the late 1950s and early 1960s, Kraft wrote mission rules and operating procedures for America’s early forays into space. Later, during the Gemini program, Kraft recruited
and developed a team of flight directors, allowing him to move into planning for the Apollo moon mission.
“Dr. Kraft is one of the founding fathers of the space age,” Wayne Hale, a flight director for more than three dozen shuttle missions, and later the space shuttle program manager, said previously. “He was one of the indispensable men that made Apollo happen. He invented flight directing out of thin air and created this whole new enterprise in such a way that we still follow the model he set.”
On Monday afternoon, Hale tweeted out, “A giant has left us: Chris Kraft is one with the ages.”
His condition apparently had worsened even as celebrations continued Saturday for the 50th anniversary of the historic lunar landing.
He is survived by his wife of 68 years, Betty Anne (Turnbull) Kraft, and two children, Gordon and Kristi-Anne.
Born Feb. 28, 1924, in Virginia, Kraft received an auspicious name for someone who would lead America into undiscovered frontiers. He was named for his father, who had been born just before Columbus Day in 1892. He became Christopher Columbus Kraft Jr.
“Can a name influence the course of a life?” Kraft asked in his memoir, “Flight.” “I’ve had most of a century to ponder that question.”
He earned a bachelor’s degree in aeronautical engineering from Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, now known as Virginia Tech, in 1944.
But for a quirk of history, he might never have ended up at NASA. He initially accepted a job offer from Chance Vought, an aircraft company that specialized in fighter planes for the U.S. Navy. But his birth certificate was delayed, causing his hiring to be put off, and instead he accepted a job at Langley Aeronautical Laboratory of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, the predecessor to NASA.
Then in 1958, he became one of the first 35 members of NASA’s Space Task Group planning Project Mercury — the country’s first human space flight effort. He designed the Apollo-era Mission Control room and shaped the concept of flight operations there.
“He always seemed to know what was over the horizon, what was coming,” Glynn Lunney, a NASA flight director during the Apollo era, said during a 2018 event at Space Center Houston, the visitors center at the Johnson Space Center.
Kraft was there in January 1961 when the first chimpanzee, Ham, was launched into space; he was there in May 1961 when Shepard became the first American in space; and he was there in February 1962 when Glenn became the first man to orbit the Earth.
And in July 1969, Kraft helped guide Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin’s touchdown on the moon.
“I always felt like it was my responsibility to provide a safe return for the astronaut,” he told the Chronicle in 2016. “That was my prime responsibility.”
Between 1969 and 1972, just 12 men walked on the moon — and Kraft helped them all from the Lone Star State. He spoke to the Chronicle several months before the moon landing anniversary, but he had not been present for the ongoing celebrations.
Despite all his accolades, Kraft told the Chronicle that he “was no brilliant engineer.”
“I was a do-it guy,” he said. “I was a can-do guy.”
That’s certainly not how most people saw him, however.
“He seemed to have a sense of how to explain things: He was a great briefer,” Lunney said in 2018.
In 1972, Kraft became director of the entire Johnson Space Center, where Mission Control is located and where the nation’s astronaut corps lives and trains. He served in that role until 1982, when he retired from the agency.
The Mission Control building on the Johnson campus was named after him in 2011. At an April 2011 ceremony naming the building, then-Houston center director Michael Coats called Kraft a “space pioneer.”
“Without (him) we’d never have heard those historic words on the surface of the moon, ‘Houston, Tranquility base here. The Eagle has landed,’ ” Coats said. “Those words effectively put Houston, and this building behind us, on the intergalactic map forever.”