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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 program, when failures
were commonplace and all too often caused not by mechanics but by politics. We
learn of many in Kraft's pages. One such failure was the Soviet Union's Sputnik
launch, about 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 rare insider's portrait
of the challenging work of astronautics--work that, Kraft writes hopefully, is
only beginning. --Gregory McNamee
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