Flight My Life in Mission Control

Amazon.com
On July 20, 1969, near the end of a great decade of near-space exploration, a small craft called Eagle landed on the moon's surface. As anyone who watched the televised broadcast of the landing might recall, the astronauts aboard Eagle were guided to their objective by a capable ground crew headed by Chris Kraft, whom his colleagues had long called "Flight." Kraft was unflappable on the surface, but, as he writes in this memoir, the Eagle's landing had moments of drama that gave him pause, and that few outside NASA knew about--including baleful alarms from the ship's on-board computer that warned of imminent disaster.

For Kraft, frightening moments were part of his job as director of Mission Control. He encountered many of them in the early years of the space program, when failures were commonplace and all too often caused not by mechanics but by politics. We learn of many in Kraft's pages. One such failure was the Soviet Union's Sputnik launch, about which Kraft thunders, "We should have beaten them.... We were stopped by anonymous doctors in the civilian world who didn't know what they were talking about, by a bureaucrat in the White House who'd been stung when JFK shot down his position on manned space flight, and by our friend the German rocket scientist, who got cold feet when he should have been bold."

FROM THE PUBLISHER

In his New York Times bestseller, Chris Kraft delivers an unforgettable account of his life in Mission Control. The first NASA flight director, Kraft emerged from a boyhood in small-town America to become a visionary who played an integral role in what would become the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. It's all here, from the legendary Mercury missions that first sent Americans into space, through the Gemini and Apollo missions that landed them on the moon. The great heroes of space are here, too -- Alan Shepard, John Glenn, Neil Armstrong, Jim Lovell, and Buzz Aldrin -- leading the space race that would change the course of U.S. history.

From NASA's infancy to its greatest triumphs...from the calculated gambles to the near disasters to the pure luck that accompanied each mission, Flight relives the spellbinding events that captured the imagination of the world. It is a stirring tribute to the U.S. space program and to the men who risked their lives to take America on a flight into the unknown -- from the man who was there for it all.

FROM THE CRITICS

Orlando Sentinal

a tale of technological triumph and good-old Yankee ingenuity and teamwork.

Publishers Weekly

Hollywood has captivated American audiences with dramatizations of the early space program and the race for the moon in movies like The Right Stuff and Apollo 13. But what really happened, before filmmakers made revisions for dramatic effect behind the scenes, as well as on the launchpads and in the cramped spaceships far from Earth? Kraft--flight director (thus his moniker "Flight") for the first Mercury flights in the early 1960s through most of the Gemini missions, chief of flight operations for the moon launches and, later, head of the Johnson Space Center in Houston--details the inception and first heady decade of NASA. In these memoirs he reveals little-known details of the space program: the young marine pilot John Glenn's cocky, stubborn side; the disorganization that contributed to the horrible launchpad fire in 1967 that killed three astronauts and NASA's subsequent soul-searching; Kraft and his staff's fight against cautious bureaucrats over the first lunar circumnavigation, one of the space program's high points; Buzz Aldrin's campaign to be the first man on the moon and why Neil Armstrong was chosen instead; and the media's construction of the U.S.-Russian space race. Kraft pulls no punches in his accounts of NASA infighting, and he gives credit where it's due, even to longtime sparring partners like NASA head George Mueller and master rocket-builder Wernher von Braun. Kraft's fair and ever-enthusiastic narrative will have broad appeal, from those who remember the first space flight to younger folks who can't imagine a world without NASA. 8 pages of photos not seen by PW. Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

KLIATT

During the early years of the Space Age, Chris Kraft's name was probably better known than that of the U.S. president. All through the '60s and '70s, it was Kraft who delivered the latest news of the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo missions to an excited world. For those who have thought of Kraft as a public relations spokesman for NASA, this book will be an eye-opener. Christopher Columbus Kraft was a fresh and untried aeronautical engineer when he started working for the National Advisory Committee on Aeronautics (NACA) in 1945. After several years designing test programs for the new jet fighters, the Soviet Union lofted Sputnik and his world was never the same again. The nation set out on a scientific renaissance, NACA morphed into the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, and Kraft found himself NASA's flight director for America's first trips into space. Both Kraft and NASA were total novices when they began to develop the new technologies and put together the interlocking programs necessary to launch a human on a brief sub-orbital flight. They did so in a very short time, and put Neil Armstrong onto the Moon a scant 12 years later. This is, quite simply, the best autobiography to come out of the space program. Kraft is an interesting person, first of all, and he does a fine job of explaining the complicated aerospace equipment and experiments. He is meticulous with his facts, as you might expect an engineer to be, but never lets the story bog down in esoteric detail. Possibly the best part of the book is his description of the amazingly complex planning and coordination efforts that were necessary before the first missile could ever leave the pad. There is also a strong "people"element throughout the book, with lifelike personality sketches of the astronauts and aerospace experts. Kraft freely describes the inevitable frustrations and personality clashes that went on behind the scenes, and isn't afraid to name names. The result is the first really full-dimensional story of America's historic first space missions. Highly recommended to public and school collections. KLIATT Codes: SA*￯﾿ﾽExceptional book, recommended for senior high school students, advanced students, and adults. 2001, Plume, 371p. illus. index.,

Kirkus Reviews

A gung-ho memoir of the American manned space-flight program, told by the crusty, avuncular flight director of the Mercury and Gemini missions (later director of the Houston Spaceflight Center). Kraft graduated from Virginia Polytechnic and then spent 12 years testing military aircraft for the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) at Langley Field in Virginia, in the process earning himself both an ulcer and valuable experience as troubleshooter of tedious design problems (and even more tedious bureaucratic conflicts among the various contractors and military agencies). After the launching of the Russian Sputnik satellite in 1958, NACA became the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), with Kraft along for the ride as an architect of the manned space program and flight director—the buck-stops-here guy—for most of the important early space flights. He disses some of the folk who didn't see things his way: he almost decks Werner von Braun, for example, and he chafes at John Glenn's "gyrene stubbornness." But he's most useful as an informative corrective to broad-brush treatments that have mythologized the space program. Tom Wolfe, according to Kraft, got some of the right stuff wrong—astronauts did not have to use their celebrity to wrest control of their spacecraft from Mission Control; from the start, Mercury capsule designers wanted to make the spacecraft as flyable as possible. Kraft also points out significant flaws and inconsistencies in the filmed treatment of the nail-biting calamities of Apollo 13. Snappy, highly detailed account of the engineering challenges, backroom bickering, and edge-of-your-seat drama surrounding 20th-centuryAmerica's most dramatic technological achievement. (8 pp. photos, not seen)