Christopher C. Kraft, Jr. - Flight Director - Flight Operations

Flight Operations

In 1957, the Russian flight of Sputnik 1 prompted the United States to accelerate its fledgling space program. On July 29, 1958, President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed the National Aeronautics and Space Act, which established NASA and subsumed NACA within this newly created organization. Langley Research Center became a part of NASA, as did Langley employees such as Kraft. Even before NASA began its official existence in October, Kraft was invited by Gilruth to become a part of a new group that was working on the problems of putting a man into orbit. Without much hesitation, he accepted the offer. When the Space Task Group was officially formed on November 5, Kraft became one of the original thirty-five engineers to be assigned to Project Mercury, America's man-in-space program.

As a member of the Space Task Group, Kraft was assigned to the flight operations division, which made plans and arrangements for the operation of the Mercury spacecraft during flight and for the control and monitoring of missions from the ground. Kraft became the assistant to Chuck Mathews, the head of the division, and was given the responsibility of putting together a mission plan. Given Mathews' casual analysis of the problem, it sounded almost simple:

However, when Kraft began to plan NASA's flight operations, no human being had yet flown in space. In fact, the task before him was vast, requiring attention to flight plans, timelines, procedures, mission rules, spacecraft tracking, telemetry, ground support, communications networks and contingency management.

One of Kraft's most important contributions to manned spaceflight would be his origination of the concept of a Mission Control Center. Many of the engineers in Project Mercury had previously worked on the flight test of aircraft, where the role for ground support was minimal. However, Kraft soon realized that an astronaut could only do so much, particularly during the fast-moving launch phase; the Mercury spacecraft would require real time monitoring and support from specialist engineers.

These concepts shaped the Mercury Control Center, which was located at Cape Canaveral in Florida. Another important concept pioneered by Kraft was the idea of the flight director, the man who would coordinate the team of engineers and make real-time decisions about the conduct of the mission. As Mathews later recalled, Kraft came to him one day saying, "There needs to be someone in charge of the flights while they're actually going on, and I want to be that person." In this informal way, the position of flight director was born.

A pivotal experience for Kraft was the flight of Mercury-Atlas 5, which sent a chimpanzee named Enos on the first American orbital spaceflight carrying a live passenger. Coverage of these early missions that carried non-human passengers could often be tongue-in-cheek; a Time Magazine article on the flight, for example, was titled "Meditative Chimponaut". Yet Kraft viewed them as important tests for the men and procedures of Mission Control, and as rehearsals for the manned missions that would follow. Originally, the flight of Mercury-Atlas 5 had been intended to last for three orbits. However, the failure of one of the hydrogen peroxide jets controlling the spacecraft's attitude forced Kraft to make the decision to bring the capsule back to Earth after two orbits. After the flight, astronaut John Glenn stated that he believed a human passenger would have been able to bring the capsule under control without the need for an early re-entry, thus (in the words of Time Magazine) "affirming the superiority of astronauts over chimponauts." Yet for Kraft, the flight of Enos represented proof of the importance of real-time decision-making in Mission Control. It also gave him his first experience of the responsibility that he as flight director would have for the life of another, whether human or chimpanzee.