Kraft was the man behind Mission Control
Chris Kraft, who created NASA’S Mission Control and made split-second white-knuckle decisions from the first daring Mercury mission to the triumphant moon landings, has died. He was 95.
Kraft died Monday in Houston, NASA said. It was just two days after the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing.
Christopher Columbus Kraft Jr. never flew in space but “held the success or failure of American human spaceflight in his hands,” Neil Armstrong, the first man-on-the-moon, told The Associated Press in 2011.
Kraft founded Mission Control and created the job of flight director — later comparing it to an orchestra conductor — and established how flights would be run as the space race between the U.S. and Soviets heated up. The legendary engineer served as flight director for all of the one-man Mercury flights and seven of the two-man Gemini flights, helped design the Apollo missions that took 12 Americans to the moon from 1969 to 1972 and later served as director of the Johnson Space Center until 1982, overseeing the beginning of the era of the space shuttle.
Armstrong once called him “the man who was the ‘Control’ in Mission Control.”
“From the moment the mission starts until the moment the crew is safe on board a recovery ship, I’m in charge,” Kraft wrote in his 2002 book “Flight: My Life in Mission Control.”
“No one can overrule me. ... They can fire me after it’s over. But while the mission is under way, I’m Flight. And Flight is God.”
NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine Monday called Kraft “a national treasure,” saying “We stand on his shoulders as we reach deeper into the solar system, and he will always be with us on those journeys.”
Kraft became known as “the father of Mission Control” and in 2011 NASA returned the favor by naming the Houston building that houses the nerve center after Kraft.
It’s the place that held its collective breath as Neil Armstrong was guiding the Eagle lunar lander on the moon while fuel was running out. And it’s the place that improvised a last-minute rescue of Apollo 13 — a dramatic scenario that later made the unsung engineers heroes in a popular movie.
In the early days of Mercury at Florida’s Cape Canaveral, before Mission Control moved to Houston in 1965, there were no computer displays, “all you had was grease pencils,” Kraft recalled. The average age of the flight control team was 26; Kraft was 38.
“We didn’t know a damn thing about putting a man into space,” Kraft wrote in his autobiography. “We had no idea how much it should or would cost. And at best, we were engineers trained to do, not business experts trained to manage.”
NASA eventually beat Kennedy’s deadline, landing the first men on the moon in July 1969. Kranz watched from Mission Control as his underlings controlled Apollo 11, but then for the neardisaster in flight on Apollo 13, he stepped in for the key decisions. He later became head of NASA’S Johnson Space Center.