Chris Kraft: Apollo 11 director dies two days after moon landings anniversary
Chris Kraft said: "From the moment the mission starts until the moment the crew is safe on board a recovery ship, I'm in charge."
Tuesday 23 July 2019 17:45, UK
The man who founded NASA's Mission Control has died just two days after the 50th anniversary of the moon landings.
Chris Kraft, who was 95, helped to design the Apollo missions that took 12 Americans to the moon from 1969 to 1972.
The first man to set foot on the lunar surface, Neil Armstrong, who was on the Apollo 11 spaceflight, once said Mr Kraft was the "Control in Mission Control", adding that he "held the success or failure of American human spaceflight in his hands".
Mr Kraft, who died on Monday, created the job of flight director and compared it to conducting an orchestra.
In his 2002 book Flight: My Life in Mission Control, he wrote: "From the moment the mission starts until the moment the crew is safe on board a recovery ship, I'm in charge."
He added: "While the mission is under way, I'm Flight. And Flight is God."
Born in 1924, Mr Kraft grew up in Phoebus, Virginia. After graduating from Virginia Polytechnic Institute in 1944, he worked for aircraft manufacturer Chance Vought, before going on to work for NASA.
The aeronautical engineer was flight director for all of the one-man Mercury flights - the US's first human spaceflight programme - and seven of the two-man Gemini flights.
When President John F Kennedy said in May 1961 that he wanted a manned trip to the moon "before this decade is out", Mr Kraft said it "scared the hell out of me", and thought JFK had "lost his mind".
He said in 1989: "We had a total of 15 minutes of manned spaceflight experience, we hadn't flown Mercury in orbit yet, and here's a guy telling me we're going to fly to the moon. Doing it was one thing, but doing it in this decade was to me too riAG百家乐在线官网."
"We didn't know a damn thing about putting a man into space," Kraft said 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."
But on 20 July, 1969, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the lunar surface.
Mr Kraft said that working on NASA's space programme has been a "wonderful life".
"I can't think of anything that an aeronautical engineer would get more out of, than what we were asked to do in the space programme, in the '60s," Mr Kraft said on NASA's website, celebrating the agency's 50th anniversary in 2008.
Mr Kraft became known as "the father of Mission Control".
In 2011, NASA named the Houston building that houses its nerve centre after him.