Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #506240 in Books
• Published on: 2002-03
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 384 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
Flight: My Life in Mission Control is the feisty memoir of Chris Kraft, head of mission control ground crew on the famous Eagle mission of 1969. 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 programme, when failures were commonplace and all too often caused not by mechanics but politics. We learn of many in Kraft's pages. One such failure was the Soviet Union's Sputnik launch, on 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 fly-on-the-wall portrait of the challenging work of astronautics--work that, Kraft writes hopefully, is only beginning. --Gregory McNamee

Customer Reviews

With out this man, NASA may never have made it to the moon
What a way to spend your life, not only was Chris Kraft one of the main people behind NASA getting to the moon, but he was also an incredible engineer involved with the X-1 he also designed a system to help control planes that had the British and American Aircraft companies confused (you get the idea this guy was a little bit smart).

But this book is really about NASA, his guiding of the mission control center and all those who worked for him, Gene Kranz included.

If you have an interest in the Mercury, Gemini or Apollo days of NASA, read this book, because a lot of it would never of happened with out Chris Kraft

Almost certainly the best account of the space race
Having read most of the books by the astronauts, controllers, and others involved, this for me was by far the best (although I must admit to being a fan of the genre in general).

Surprisingly for me (given that I'm a geek!), it was the human side of most of the stories that were the most interesting. If you have any interest at all in the space race, buy this book.

My only criticism is a minor one: In the last couple of pages, where Kraft discusses how we should still be exploring and moving out (with which I totally agree), he makes constant reference to "America should do this", "American people must do that", etc. Sure - it was America who won the space race, and I do not wish to take that away from them, but the cold war is over now - mankind must move forwards as a whole from now, not just America. But I would say that, being a Brit!

Great book: buy it.

Fascinating and surprisingly readable
The man at the centre of the organisation behind the moon landings gives us some indication of the engineering complexities, planning details and bureaucracy behind the effort, but also adds some entertaining and frank insights into the people involved.
The book is at its best when describing the background to the earlier Mercury and Gemini missions. The details of the moon landings, when he was no longer directly in charge as flight director, are skipped over a little, and you will find a lot more detail elsewhere.