Review and Interview by Mark Wolverton

American History,August 2001

Everyone who watched the glory days of Apollo on television knows about Mission Control, the console-filled room where serious men wearing headsets, white shirts, and pocket protectors monitored every space mission. Chris Kraft was the man in charge, the quintessential flight director who literally invented spaceflight operations.

As a member of NASA's Space Task Group planning to put an American into space at the beginning of the space age, Kraft realized that, "right stuff" or not, no astronaut would be able to keep up with all the split-second complexities of space flight. Flightis the story of how Kraft put together and led a team of engineers on the ground that could not only monitor every function of a spacecraft and guide its course with amazing precision all the way to the moon, but also hear every heartbeat and detect every footstep of an astronaut on the lunar surface 238,000 miles away. It's both an insider's history of the early years of human space flight and a compelling personal memoir. Writing in a clear, matter-of-fact style, Kraft effectively conveys the excitement and drama of a time when everything was new and fraught with risk: Alan Shepard's first flight, the tragedy of the Apollo 1 fire, and the later triumphs of Apollo. Yet, as an engineer used to dealing directly with facts instead of political niceties, Kraft doesn't hesitate to speak his mind, whether about the less-than-heroic exploits of some astronauts, the meddlings of bureaucrats, or his ambivalent feelings regarding both the ego and wartime past of Wernher von Braun.

The astronauts got all the parades and the glory, but just as heroic were the largely unknown people on Earth who watched over them and their spacecraft, anticipating problems and solving them as they arose. Flight is an indispensable complement to the many recent astronaut autobiographies that give only one side of the equation.

- MARK WOLVERTON is a freelance science writer who thinks we should have landed on Mars by now.



Talking With Chris Kraft

If not for Chris Kraft, it's possible no one would have seen Neil Armstrong's one small step live from the moon. Some NASA officials opposed carrying a TV camera aboard the Apollo flights. "They thought we could do without it, that the motion picture and still cameras we took along would be sufficient and that it wasn't worth the weight," says Kraft. "That sounds funny today, but not at that time. We were very, very tough about keeping weight off the vehicle." Kraft fought passionately for the American people's right to see man's first steps on another world -- even if only in black and white (a small lightweight color TV camera wasn't yet available). "It was a lousy picture, but better than nothing," he says. Especially when the alternative would have been just listening to Armstrong's voice. "That would have been terrible, wouldn't it?" Kraft agrees.

As one of the true pioneers who took America to the moon, Kraft is acutely aware of missed opportunities. After Apollo 11, he says, "we found ourselves in a dead-end program. My biggest disappointment is that we didn't end up after Apollo with the political, congressional and public support for continuing."

Asked what he would do if put in charge of NASA today, Kraft doesn't hesitate. "I think we ought to set the goal of going back to the moon and to Mars. I would immediately lay out the steps which would get us a permanent base on the back side of the moon. That would lead to the tools to live on Mars." Unfortunately, with NASA's budget tied up in a space station program he describes as "an albatross," Kraft doesn't see his visions happening anytime soon. "U.S. space policy in the last 20 years has actually been a roadblock for better uses of the government's money in space. We really haven't had any visionary leadership in NASA, and that's too bad."

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(C) 2001 Mark Wolverton. All rights reserved.

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