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Flight: My Life in Mission Control, by Christopher Kraft
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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 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.
"A highly readable memoir." (The New York Times Book Review)
"A rewarding look at the brief, shining moment when space pathfinders held sway over space warriors." (The Washington Post)
- Sales Rank: #310462 in Books
- Published on: 2002-02-26
- Released on: 2002-02-26
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: .91" h x 6.02" w x 9.00" l,
- Binding: Paperback
- 384 pages
Amazon.com Review
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."
Plenty of other contemporaries, including John Glenn and Richard Nixon, come in for a scolding in Kraft's fiery account, which offers a rare insider's portrait of the challenging work of astronautics--work that, Kraft writes hopefully, is only beginning. --Gregory McNamee
From Booklist
Besides the astronauts, Kraft was one of NASA's best-known personalities in the agency's heroic decade of the 1960s, once making the cover of Time. The blunt-speaking demeanor that made Kraft popular with the press is fully present in his memoir, in which he lets fly about various instances of his dissatisfaction with the performance of an astronaut, engineer, or contractor. Such dirty-laundry airing, verboten at the time by the publicity-conscious NASA, is one reason for space-history buffs to flock to Kraft's narrative, but the principal attraction is how he ramped up from scratch the flight control operation for Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo. When Sputnik beeped the U.S. into a panic, Kraft was an engineer at the obscure National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), quickly revamped as NASA. Tapped by the unsung organizer of manned flight, Robert Gilruth, to establish what became Mission Control, Kraft directed the early flights, whose participants he critiques by his lights as a no-nonsense engineer. His key role and frankness of recollection make Kraft a worthy memoirist of pioneering space flight. Gilbert Taylor
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Review
...[a] highly readable memoir... -- New York Times Book Review
a tale of technological triumph and good-old Yankee ingenuity and teamwork. -- Orlando Sentinal
Most helpful customer reviews
7 of 7 people found the following review helpful.
Indispensable Reading on The US Space Program
By R. F. Mojica
Before purchasing this book I read some of the reviews, and a number of the reviewers seemed to be irked by what they thought was the over-egotistical character of both the book and the author of the book. I didn't get this sense at all. Sure, Kraft wrote about his life and achievements, his contributions to the space program, and the history of the space program from his personal viewpoint, but what else is to be expected of an autobiography? After all, in reading his book, this is exactly what we want.
I found this to be a very interesting and informative account, especially of the pre-NASA NACA, of the formation and early days of NASA, and of the earliest manned missions of the Mercury and Gemini programs. Others have said it skims quickly over the Apollo missions, but I felt this was more a strength than a weakness, as there are hundreds of books on Apollo, but not so many that give such strong and detailed accounts of Mercury and Gemini. Kraft was in a unique position to know the inside stories of these missions and he gives us these stories, while most books skim Mercury and, especially, Gemini, in their rush to get to the moon landings.
There are a few surprising thoughts and revelations here. To me, the biggest eye-raiser was his discussion of President Johnson's contribution to the space program. Now, in my opinion, Johnson was about the worst single American since Benedict Arnold, but, having read other books on the space program, I always gave him credit for his strong support of that program. Other writers have even postulated the theory that Johnson was a stronger supporter of our space goals than was Kennedy and deserved more credit for their success. Not so, says Kraft. He doesn't go into it too deeply, but he felt that Johnson lost interest in space as he bungled his way through his miserable White House years, and that he oversaw the cutting of the space budget, and the lessening of our goals in space, as time moved on from the heady days of the Kennedy presidency. This budget cutting was continued rather than instituted by Nixon, who is often the villain of these space books.
The main talking point and controversy of this book is its very angry account of the Mercury flight of Scott Carpenter. While reading it you may find yourself saying, "OK, this was 50 years ago. It's time to let go of that hostility." There is also the need to take Carpenter's version of the story into consideration. However, the frustration of dealing with an astronaut in a space capsule, his life in dire peril, who will not follow instructions and will not communicate with those on the ground who are trying to save his life, is understandable. For a neutral account with no personal axe to grind, the Alan Shepherd biography "Light This Candle" goes into Carpenter's flight in detail, because Shepherd was a capcom on that mission, and the agony of trying to get Carpenter home alive comes through just as strongly in that book as in this, as does the verdict that, whatever the Carpenter apologist say, the general opinion amongst the astronauts themselves was that Carpenter screwed up. But the average reader can feel justified in thinking Kraft's account of the mess became too personalized, and when, at the end of the book, Kraft can't resist the urge to take one last shot, saying, in effect, that every single astronaut who flew did an outstanding job "except for Carpenter", it took on the aspect of piling on.
A couple of other incidents that this book brings some clarity to. One is the whole Schirra/Apollo 7 dust-up. Kraft, who has a naught but praise for Schirra's performance on his Mercury and Gemini flights, admits to being mystified by Wally's intransigence before and during the Apollo 7 mission. He makes it clear that Schirra's bad temper was not just the result of a head cold, as was reported in the press at the time, but began well before the mission, endured throughout training, and just continued during the flight itself. Kraft's conclusion was that Schirra suffered a temporary loss of nerve following the Apollo 1 fire, something understandable, since Schirra was on the back-up crew for that flight and had beeen training in the same spacecraft, doing the same tests, as that which killed Grissom, White & Chaffee, and it was pure luck that the fire killed the primary crew instead of the back-up crew--all that on top of losing, in a stupid, preventable accident, three fellow astronauts with whom he was training closely, and especially fellow original 7 astronaut and close friend Gus Grissom.
Kraft goes into the so-called stamp scandal following Apollo 15, and resented being made the goat for the whole mess. Reading about this "scandal" now, we have to wonder why such a big deal was made of it in the first place. Also, other reviewers have raised an issue with Kraft's portrayal of Wernher von braun & his German contingent. I don't. Kraft was fair to von Braun, giving him proper credit for his contributions, if he didn't like him personally. I think this book serves as an antidote to the cult of von Braun that exists amongst some space junkies. Von Braun was the mastermind of the Saturn V rocket, but he had little to do with Gemini, nothing to do with computer guidance systems, the LEM, the Apollo Command Module, the radio tracking system, etc. The Saturn V would have been useless without these other developments, as they would have been without the Saturn V. Each was a necessary component of the successful moon missions, but none more noteworthy than the others. One can argue that James Chamberlin and the Canadian & British engineers who came to NASA after the cancellation of the AVRO Arrow project, were as important and made as great a contribution to NASA's success as did von Braun and his Germans. Their story is not as interesting, Chamberlin not as charismatic as von Braun, so we hear little of them. Kraft gives them a fair mention here, but even he gets caught up in von Braun, if a bit on the anti side.
An indispensable volume for those interested in the space program, and more valuable for its emphasis on the early days. Like others, I think this should be read together with Gene Kranz's book. They form an excellent background on the technical side of the Mercury, Gemini & Apollo programs.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
An American Hero
By Donald Smith
I really enjoyed the book. Great detail on the politics of the scene at that time. Fantastic details on each and every flight with insight into the astronauts, their good points and bad.
I can see why we were so successful with a man like Kraft in charge of flight operations and he developed men like Gene Krantz as the program expanded.
A true American Hero.
Don Smith
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful.
An excellent book and must have for anyone interested in early space flight
By Colin Brown
Flight by Chris Kraft is a rivetting read, taking you from his early childhood through to his days in Langley, joining the STG team and onto NASA in mission control.
Even though most people know what happened during the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo years this book keep the reader engrossed by not holding back any punches and telling it exactly as it was. Most of the book is dedicated to the earlier flights (Mercury and Gemini) and the Apollo missions past the Fire of Apollo 1 seem a bit curtailed. This may have been due to Kraft changing roles during the Apollo project.
This book is certainly on par with Gene Kranz "Failure is not an option". A Must read.
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