Christopher Columbus Kraft, NASA’s legendary flight director, has died

Christopher Columbus Kraft Jr.—one of NASA's founding engineers, its first flight director, and a key architect of the Apollo and space shuttle programs—has died at the age of 95.

Back during the earliest days of NASA, the head of the agency's Space Task Group, Robert Gilruth, assigned Kraft the job of drawing up rules and procedures for safely managing the flight of a human into space, through the great blackness, and back to the ground. Kraft was to do all of this without the aid of a calculator or sophisticated computer and without any reference material. And he had to hurry, because the Soviet Union had already taken a big lead in the Space Race.

Over time, the work Kraft did in writing those rules, as well as hiring a talented team of flight directors and controllers, helped NASA fly the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programs. Kraft became, in the words of astronaut Neil Armstrong, the "control" in Mission Control. Today, NASA's Mission Control in Houston bears his name—the Christopher C. Kraft Jr. Mission Control Center.

"A giant has left us," said Wayne Hale, a flight director for more than three dozen shuttle missions and later the space shuttle program manager.

On a personal level, Chris Kraft was also my friend. It hurts very much to write about his passing.

I met Chris late in his life while I was a reporter for the Houston Chronicle. The year was 2009, and I was seeking to write a story about the 40th anniversary of the Apollo landing on the Moon. He invited me to visit his home in Clear Lake, and it turned out that I lived about a mile away. His wife, Betty Anne, graciously met me at the door, and Chris and I went upstairs to his den for a long discussion.

Talks over a Coke

We didn't stop talking there. I was just beginning to write about NASA in greater depth, and Kraft took the time to explain how things really were, at least from his point of view. At the time, Kraft was focused on saving the space shuttle, which George W. Bush had decided to stop flying after the Columbia accident in 2003. Kraft had directed Johnson Space Center during the 1970s, when engineers there designed and managed development of the reusable space plane. By the time we started talking, it was too late. The shuttle would fly its final mission in 2011.

Every few months, I would make a pilgrimage to Kraft's home, and we fell into a routine. We'd be seated upstairs in reclining leather chairs. Kraft would ask what I had been hearing about the space program. Then it was open season: I could ask anything I wanted, from his experiences at Virginia Tech and his early years of NASA, about which astronauts he had liked—and which he hadn't—to his thoughts on current affairs at NASA. Somewhere along the way, Betty Anne would bring us glasses of Coca-Cola with ice.

Later, Kraft would become an inspiration for the Adrift series I wrote for the Chronicle in 2014. By that time, he had become a harsh critic of the space agency's approach to human spaceflight, as it sought to replicate the Apollo model of exploration with a large rocket, a capsule, and more. With the series, I tried to give a voice to the frustrations of Kraft and other aging veterans of Apollo who were both frustrated and aghast that the program they had labored over during the 1960s had retreated from deep space and not returned. In 2017, Kraft helped again as a leading voice in our Greatest Leap series to remember Apollo and understand why NASA had not gone further. You can see our full 1 hour 20 minute interview with Kraft below.

Kraft was especially galled that the Space Launch System rocket would take the shuttle's reusable main engines, use them once, and discard them into the ocean. "You're going to burn those engines and throw them away," Kraft told me one time. "My god, you can't do that very often unless you've got a lot of money." He believed NASA shouldn't try to compete with the private sector when companies like SpaceX had started to show they were pretty good at building rockets.

Over those last 10 years, it was difficult to watch Chris grow older, having to give up his beloved golf as he slowed down. His upstairs office had more photos of Kraft with famous golfers than he did space mementos—and he had plenty of those. At times, I'd spot something that would drive home to me just how much history he had seen. A few years ago, for example, I spied a name tag on one of the tables in his office, commemorating the 50th anniversary of Kraft's college graduation from Virginia Tech in 1945. This name tag was, itself, 20 years old.

Honoring his memory

He was born on February 28, 1924. His father had been born just before Columbus Day, in 1892, on the 400th anniversary of European contact with the Americas. So Kraft inherited his father's name. "Can a name influence the course of a life?" Kraft asks in his memoir, Flight. "I've had most of a century to ponder that question. I think with a name like Christopher Columbus Kraft Jr. some of my life's direction was settled from the start."

During his early years, Kraft mostly just had that name. His family was poor. But like so many young men and women who came of age during World War II, he served his country in various ways and grew along with the stature of the nation. Kraft went to work for the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, where he helped test aircraft. This organization eventually became the nucleus of NASA, and Kraft's career took off from there.

I never saw Kraft in his heyday, of course. After he gave up golfing, he continued to get his exercise by, of all things, mall walking. So in the last few years, if you saw an older man, small of stature, with white hair slicked back, ambling around Baybrook Mall, it may well have been one of the humans most responsible for the Moon landing we've been celebrating during the last week.

I've often wondered what it must really have been like for the young men and women of Apollo—who flew so far, fast, and high during the 1960s—to spend the rest of their lives trying to measure up to that moment. In their 20s and 30s, they'd achieved this great thing, collectively. Never again would they be a part of such a monumental achievement.

Today, as the legends of Apollo pass away—and dozens of the 400,000 men and women who worked on Apollo die every day—there really is only one thing we can do to honor their great works half a century ago. We can build on their work by going further, by going smarter, and then staying out there. I can definitively say that is what Chris Kraft would have wanted.

Listing image by Mission Control: The Unsung Heroes of Apollo