Christopher C. Kraft Jr. Photo Credit/RNASA Photo
NASA’s Mission Control Center, known around the world as the pulse of U. S. human spaceflight — from the missions of Mercury and the Apollo moon landings to the assembly of the International Space Station, was named for Christopher Kraft Jr. on Thursday.
Kraft, 87, served as the space agency’s first flight director, a responsibility he held through the Mercury missions and some of the Gemini flights.
He rose to become the Johnson Space Center’s deputy director in 1970. Two years later he became director until his retirement in 1982. Kraft was among those at Thursday’s ceremonies at the Johnson Space Center in Houston.
A graduate of the Virginia Polytechnic Institute in aerospace engineering, Kraft joined NASA’s forerunner, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics in 1945. Thirteen years later, he transferred to the Space Task Group, which began work on Project Mercury within the newly created National Aeronautics and Space Administration.
In 1962, the STG moved to Houston, where it became the nucleus for the Johnson Space Center. Mission Control opened in June 1965 for Gemini IV. The facility was revamped and re-opened in 1995 to support shuttle missions to Russia’s Mir Space Station and eventually orchestrate the assembly of the International Space Station.
The current facility houses the historic Apollo Flight Control Room, a shuttle control room, station control room, training control facility and control facilities for NASA’s space life sciences experiments.