Flight: My Life in Mission Control

Orlando Sentinal

a tale of technological triumph and good-old Yankee ingenuity and teamwork.

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Hollywood has captivated American audiences with dramatizations of the early space program and the race for the moon in movies like The Right Stuff and Apollo 13. But what really happened, before filmmakers made revisions for dramatic effect behind the scenes, as well as on the launchpads and in the cramped spaceships far from Earth? Kraft--flight director (thus his moniker "Flight") for the first Mercury flights in the early 1960s through most of the Gemini missions, chief of flight operations for the moon launches and, later, head of the Johnson Space Center in Houston--details the inception and first heady decade of NASA. In these memoirs he reveals little-known details of the space program: the young marine pilot John Glenn's cocky, stubborn side; the disorganization that contributed to the horrible launchpad fire in 1967 that killed three astronauts and NASA's subsequent soul-searching; Kraft and his staff's fight against cautious bureaucrats over the first lunar circumnavigation, one of the space program's high points; Buzz Aldrin's campaign to be the first man on the moon and why Neil Armstrong was chosen instead; and the media's construction of the U.S.-Russian space race. Kraft pulls no punches in his accounts of NASA infighting, and he gives credit where it's due, even to longtime sparring partners like NASA head George Mueller and master rocket-builder Wernher von Braun. Kraft's fair and ever-enthusiastic narrative will have broad appeal, from those who remember the first space flight to younger folks who can't imagine a world without NASA. 8 pages of photos not seen by PW. Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

A gung-ho memoir of the American manned space-flight program, told by the crusty, avuncular flight director of the Mercury and Gemini missions (later director of the Houston Spaceflight Center). Kraft graduated from Virginia Polytechnic and then spent 12 years testing military aircraft for the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) at Langley Field in Virginia, in the process earning himself both an ulcer and valuable experience as troubleshooter of tedious design problems (and even more tedious bureaucratic conflicts among the various contractors and military agencies). After the launching of the Russian Sputnik satellite in 1958, NACA became the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), with Kraft along for the ride as an architect of the manned space program and flight director—the buck-stops-here guy—for most of the important early space flights. He disses some of the folk who didn't see things his way: he almost decks Werner von Braun, for example, and he chafes at John Glenn's "gyrene stubbornness." But he's most useful as an informative corrective to broad-brush treatments that have mythologized the space program. Tom Wolfe, according to Kraft, got some of the right stuff wrong—astronauts did not have to use their celebrity to wrest control of their spacecraft from Mission Control; from the start, Mercury capsule designers wanted to make the spacecraft as flyable as possible. Kraft also points out significant flaws and inconsistencies in the filmed treatment of the nail-biting calamities of Apollo 13. Snappy, highly detailed account of the engineering challenges, backroom bickering, and edge-of-your-seat drama surrounding 20th-centuryAmerica's most dramatic technological achievement. (8 pp. photos, not seen)