Chris Kraft obituary

The engineer Chris Kraft, who has died aged 95, was Nasa’s first flight director, the man who shaped the team – and the control centre – at Cape Canaveral in Florida and, from 1963, in Houston, Texas. Kraft’s work spanned the era from Nasa’s first faltering manned missions during the space race of the 1960s to the space shuttle in the 80s.

He was director of flight operations at Nasa when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin made their moon landing in Apollo 11 on 20 July 1969, and signed off with the Apollo 12 mission that November. He returned in 1970 to chair the crisis meeting as the crippled Apollo 13 limped back to Earth.

As director of the Johnson Space Center – originally known as the Manned Space Center – in Houston from 1972 to 1982, he oversaw Skylab, America’s first space station, the Apollo-Soyuz docking in 1975 and the arrival of the space shuttle. “To err is human,” Kraft would tell a generation of ground controllers, “but to do so more than once is contrary to flight operations division’s policy.”

Kraft was born in Phoebus, Virginia, the son of Vanda (nee Suddreth) and Christopher Kraft. He was of Bavarian immigrant stock – his grandmother was a bar-keeper whose business was wrecked by prohibition. His father’s first world war US army service ended with a nervous breakdown; after the war Kraft Sr worked for a while in the finance department of a local veterans’ hospital. He was a “joiner”, his son recalled, a member of the local American Legion and the fire department. Yet Kraft Sr’s life was dogged by mental illness. His son wrote that his father’s influence had been more shadow than substance.

Chris was educated at the local high school, where he excelled at baseball and bugle playing. Turned down by the US navy because of a childhood burns injury, he took a two-year wartime course at Virginia Polytechnic Institute (1942-44), graduating with a degree in aeronautical engineering.

In January 1945 Kraft was accepted at the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (Naca) at Langley, Virginia. There he worked in the stability and control branch under Chuck Mathews, researching aircraft design problems.

In 1957 the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, the first artificial Earth satellite, and as part of the US response it was decided to integrate Naca into Nasa. So, the following autumn, Kraft became one of the 45 members of Nasa’s Space Task Group, assigned to the flight operations division.

Jet pilots had brushed space, but no human had yet ventured out of the Earth’s atmosphere. The world’s first spaceman, Yuri Gagarin, of the Soviet Union, would not go into orbit until 1961. Indeed, in the unfolding mythology of space, not only was David Bowie’s Major Tom absent, so was ground control. “There needs to be somebody in charge of the flights while they’re actually going on,” Mathews recalled Kraft telling him. “And I’d like to be that person.” Thus Kraft became Nasa’s first flight director.

His earliest experience in the role came on 5 May 1961, when Alan Shepard became the first American in space, with a sub-orbital loop in the Mercury capsule Freedom 7. On 20 February 1962, for the third manned Mercury mission, John Glenn went into orbit – and provided a defining moment in Kraft’s relationship with Nasa. During the astronaut’s second orbit there was an indication that the space capsule’s heat shield was unlatched. “My gut told me instantly it was a faulty signal,” Kraft wrote; and he would be proved right. But senior management overruled him about the correct response. “From now on, I swore, they’d play hell before they overruled any decision I made.”

Thirteen weeks later Glenn was followed into orbit by Scott Carpenter, on a mission still dogged by controversy. Kraft considered that the astronaut had disregarded his instructions, accusations that Carpenter vehemently denied until his death in 2013. “I swore an oath that Scott Carpenter would never fly again,” wrote Kraft. “He didn’t.”

On 25 May 1961 President John F Kennedy pledged that Americans would land on, and return from, the moon before the end of the decade. The space race was “deadly damn serious”, wrote Kraft, a red-blooded patriot, in his combative memoir Flight: My Life in Mission Control (2001), “and the future of our American way of life was at stake”.

There would be three stages on the way to the moon. Project Mercury, which ended in 1963, put solo astronauts into orbit, and the two-man Gemini programme (1962-66) developed the technology for a lunar landing. Apollo was about landing on the moon.

On 3 June 1965 Ed White became the first American to walk in space – and enjoyed it too much. It took a demanding “the mission director says to get back in” to get the astronaut to return to Gemini IV. Two months later, on 27 August – even as Gordon Cooper and Pete Conrad, on board Gemini V, were establishing a record for longest flight – Time magazine was making Kraft the subject of that week’s cover feature. This did not endear him to all his colleagues in the unfolding Apollo programme, but it did establish Kraft’s place in the American public imagination.

With the first manned rendezvous in orbit that December, of Gemini VII and VI-A, Kraft was focused on his remoter role as director of flight operations. “The entire flight control team … ” he wrote, “was probably the best systems engineering organisation in the world.” Day-to-day ground control was being delegated to others, but Kraft had become a charismatic figure within Nasa, and ultimately, as Charles Murray and Catherine Cox observed in Apollo: The Race to the Moon (1989), “the embodiment of mission control”.

After leaving Houston in 1982 Kraft worked as a consultant, and chaired a panel in the 1990s that produced a controversial report into the space shuttle which was accused of playing down safety issues. He received many honours, including Nasa’s outstanding leadership medal, four Nasa distinguished service medals, the National Space Trophy and Nasa’s ambassador of exploration award. In 2011 the Johnson Space Center named its mission control centre the Christopher C Kraft Jr Control Center.

In 1950 Kraft married Betty Turnbull. She survives him, as do their children, Kristi-Anne and Gordon.

Christopher Columbus Kraft, engineer, born 28 February 1924; died 22 July 2019