[FPSPACE] Review of Chris Kraft's book

[Dwayne Allen Day]

This review indicates that Kraft's book provides some interesting opinions
of von Braun and John Glenn.


DDAY

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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A42565-2001Feb22.html

Space Cowboy 
'Flight: My Life in Mission Control' by Chris Kraft 
Reviewed by James P. Pinkerton
Sunday, February 25, 2001; Page BW08 

FLIGHT 
My Life in Mission Control
By Chris Kraft
Dutton. 371 pp. $25.95

In early 1945, 20-year-old Christopher Columbus Kraft, just graduated from
Virginia Tech with a BS in aeronautical engineering, was eager to do his
part in the war effort. Disqualified from military service by a childhood
injury, he went to work instead for the National Advisory Committee for
Aeronautics (NACA) at Langley Field, Va. An epoch -- the rise and fall of
the space program -- lay ahead of him.

Created in 1915, NACA was a cornerstone of the military-industrial
complex, employing engineers such as Kraft to keep the United States
pre-eminent in the Cold War. But in 1957 the USSR launched Sputnik, and
suddenly America was behind in a new competition, the space race. The
following year, NACA became NASA, and Kraft moved to Houston, to be
present at the creation of the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo programs. He
gained fame as the Voice of NASA, the man who immortalized the televised
countdown to liftoff. His memoir, Flight: My Life in Mission Control,
details his 37-year career inside the federal air and space programs.
Now in his eighth decade, Kraft has produced an account heavy with
personality and technology -- although light on broader reflections upon
the events that first made astronauts so central, and then so peripheral,
to American life. Kraft is an engineer, and it's understandable that he is
better at describing how people make specific machines than at analyzing
how polities make national decisions.

In those early days, he and his colleagues had a general mandate to
surpass the Soviets, but it was up to them to sweat the details. So they
did, though not without conflict. A key early issue was who would control
the mission: the astronaut atop the rocket taking off from Cape Canaveral
or the flight controllers at the Manned Space Center in Houston. Wernher
von Braun got into that argument. He lost at the time -- and he gets it in
the neck here 40 years later.

Von Braun was a Nazi rocket scientist who transferred his allegiance and
his expertise to the United States in 1945. A former pilot himself, he
didn't think a mission could be controlled from the ground, a view
naturally putting him at odds with ground-controller Kraft. Recalling
their first meeting, Kraft writes, "This may be the famous Wernher von
Braun, I thought angrily, but he doesn't know what the hell he's talking
about." The two men remained co-workers for 20 years, although one would
hardly know from Kraft's telling that von Braun ever did anything
right; yet others plainly thought so, leading President Gerald Ford to
award him the National Medal of Science in 1977.

Another of Kraft's villains is John Glenn. The author dredges up their
first meeting, in the early '50s, when he was still working at NACA. As a
young engineer armed with data, Kraft took his concerns about the safety
of the F8U fighter to Glenn, a onetime Marine pilot in Korea who was then
flying a desk. Kraft was told bluntly: You don't know what you're talking
about. In his view, Glenn was blinded by his allegiance to Chance Vought,
the manufacturer of the F8U. But Kraft persisted, going over Glenn's head,
and eventually the plane was grounded. A decade later, when they were both
at NASA, Kraft's opinion of Glenn had not improved; unlike many other
newly minted astronauts, the Marine seemed uninterested in the
nitty-gritty of putting a man in space. Instead, writes Kraft, "Glenn's
goal was to cozy up to our top management and thus improve his chances of
getting one of the early Mercury flights."

Yet if Kraft had enemies, he also had friends -- lots of them. And he
seems determined now to give them all an honorable mention, from
professors in college to mentors at NACA to subordinates at NASA. This
Rolodex-dump sometimes slows down the story -- and it also leaves the
reader unprepared for the occasional calamity, as when a launchpad fire
killed three Apollo astronauts in 1967. "They were dead and we knew it was
our fault," Kraft writes, although the narrative up to that point provides
little context for such self-laceration.

But context is not Kraft's strength. His is a detailed chronicle of the
years in which the space program evolved from its origins in the
military-industrial complex into an idealistic Kennedyesque expression of
American greatness. Yet the author has little to say about why that
idealism wilted so quickly in the years since Apollo 11. And today, as the
military roots of the space program sprout afresh, in the form of Defense
Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's plans for both missile defense and
anti-satellite offense, a full appreciation of the peaceful potential of
space is more important than ever. Flight is not that book, but it is
still a rewarding look at the brief, shining moment when space pathfinders
held sway over space warriors. 

James P. Pinkerton, former White House aide to Presidents Reagan and
George H.W. Bush, is an adjunct fellow at the New America Foundation in
Washington, D.C.