Whipped Cream Difficulties

Christopher Kraft, NASA flight director and legend.

For 25 years, from the dawn of the space age in the 1950s to the threshold of almost routine launchings in the 1980s, Mr. Kraft played crucial roles in the space program. He devised the protocols for exploration beyond the Earth’s atmosphere, orchestrated early orbital missions and spacewalks, and developed projects that put astronauts on the moon and into the first reusable space shuttles.
Aside from the astronauts who made history — including Alan B. Shepard Jr., with his suborbital flight; John Glenn, in orbiting the Earth; and Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, the first to land on the lunar surface — Mr. Kraft was the most familiar face of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s early years, the steady ground commander who often explained missions to a rapt world at news conferences.
In an era of perilous experiments hastened by the Soviet success of Sputnik, the first artificial satellite, Mr. Kraft presided over triumphal breakthroughs in the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo projects. He also stood by helplessly when a fire killed three astronauts on a launchpad in 1967, but he helped devise the ingenious plan that saved the Apollo 13 crew after an explosion crippled their spacecraft en route to the moon in 1970.
At a time when there were no rules or procedures for space travel, Mr. Kraft, a brilliant aeronautical engineer, virtually wrote the book for NASA. He originated the concept of mission control, with authority vested in a ground-based flight director, not in a pilot-astronaut soaring through space at 7 miles a second who might be overwhelmed by pressures, especially during launch or re-entry.

NASA. I think this is a great story:

With the advent of the jet age of the 1950s, he was assigned as project engineer on flight tests of the Navy’s high-priority Vought F8U Crusader, which was exhibiting numerous birthing problems in its earliest versions. The problems uncovered by Langley flight tests included unacceptable g-force control behavior during maneuvers, which was determined to result from unintentional pivoting of the unique movable wing used by the configuration. Working with Langley test pilot Jack Reeder, Kraft identified the structural source of the problem, and took on the unpleasant job of telling the Navy that its new first-line aircraft was potentially dangerous. His warnings were heeded by Navy management, resulting in grounding of the F8U fleet, much to the chagrin of many operators of the new aircraft. He then encountered one of the most contentious members of the Navy’s Bureau of Aeronautics, who questioned the Langley results and doubted the conclusions drawn by the NACA. That Marine Major was named John Glenn. Following a detailed examination of the Langley study results with Kraft and Reeder, and interviews with Navy pilots who flew the aircraft, Glenn was convinced and became a believer. The F8U was subsequently redesigned, as recommended by Kraft and his associates at Langley, and served the nation as an outstanding fighter during the Vietnam War.

Houston Chronicle.

In an interview in February with the Houston Chronicle, Kraft said he never wanted to be an astronaut.
“I liked my job better than theirs,” he said. “I got to go on every flight, and besides that, I got to tell them what to do.”

Edited to add: I don’t like linking to Ars Technica, but I’m making an exception in this case: Eric Berger, the author of their Chris Kraft obit, was also a personal friend of Mr. Kraft.

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.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 23rd, 2019 at 6:51 am and is filed under History, Obits, Planes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.