Day: July 23, 2019

Chris Kraft, NASA’s first flight director who invented the concept of Mission Control, has died. He was 95.

Kraft’s death in Houston on Monday (July 22) was confirmed by NASA.

“America has truly lost a national treasure today with the passing of one of NASA’s earliest pioneers,” Administrator Jim Bridenstine said in a statement. “We send our deepest condolences to the Kraft family.”

“Chris was one of the core team members [who] helped our nation put humans in space and on the moon, and his legacy is immeasurable,” said Bridenstine.

A member of the 1958 Space Task Group that was charged with managing the United States’ burgeoning human spaceflight programs, Kraft was named NASA’s first flight director with the responsibility of not only defining the position’s role, but also how mission planning and operations would be conducted.

Beginning with the first launch of a Mercury astronaut into space, Kraft developed the processes for go-no-go decisions, space-to-ground communications, mission tracking, real-time problem solving and crew recovery.

“Mercury Control was our first classroom, Chris was our first teacher and mentor,” said Gene Kranz, one of the first three flight directors who Kraft chose to succeed him in the role, speaking at the 2011 naming of NASA’s Mission Control Center in Houston, Texas, for Kraft. “Chris was our leader, his call sign was ‘Flight.’ Integrity was his hallmark.”

(Image credit: NASA)

From 1961 to 1966, Kraft served as Flight for many historic missions, including the first launch to put an American astronaut into Earth orbit and the first spacewalk of the Gemini program. During the later phases of the Mercury program, Kraft helped develop the Manned Spacecraft Center (MSC; renamed the Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center in 1973) in Houston, and then moved there in 1962, along with other members of the Space Task Group.

“Once comparing his complex work as a flight director to a conductor’s, Kraft said, ‘The conductor can’t play all the instruments — he may not even be able to play any one of them. But, he knows when the first violin should be playing, and he knows when the trumpets should be loud or soft, and when the drummer should be drumming. He mixes all this up and out comes music. That’s what we do here,'” said Bridenstine, citing the late flight director.

(Image credit: NASA)

During the Apollo program, Kraft was promoted to Director of Flight Operations and given responsibility for the overall mission planning, training and execution of human spaceflight at NASA. He continued in this role through the first and second moon landing missions in 1969, before becoming deputy director of the Manned Spacecraft Center.

Kraft later served as MSC (and then Johnson Space Center) director from January 1972 until his retirement in August 1982, adding to the success of the remaining Apollo missions; the first U.S. space station, Skylab; the first joint mission carried out with the Soviet Union, the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project; and the first missions of the space shuttle.

Born on Feb. 28, 1924, in Phoebus (now part of Hampton), Virginia, Christopher Columbus Kraft, Jr. inherited his name from his father. He would later write that with the choice of his name “some of my life’s direction was settled from the start.”

Kraft attended Virginia Polytechnic Institute (now Virginia Tech) and enrolled in mechanical engineering in 1941. After being declared unfit for military service as a result of a severe burn suffered to his right hand when he was three years old, Kraft graduated with one of the first aeronautical engineering degrees awarded by the institute in 1944.

Following a short-lived position at Chance Vought in Connecticut, Kraft joined the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), the predecessor to NASA, at the Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory in Virginia in 1945. There, he served as project engineer for the P-51H, an advanced version of the Mustang single-seat fighter and fighter-bomber. He also conducted analytical work on gust alleviation and directed a study on the wake turbulence caused by trailing vortices.

Kraft was then assigned as project engineer for the Navy’s Vought F8U Crusader jet aircraft, which was exhibiting unacceptable g-force control behavior during test flights at Langley. Working with test pilot Jack Reeder, Kraft was able to identify the structural source of the problem and advised the Navy of such. His warnings were heeded, resulting in the F8U being redesigned before serving as a fighter jet during the Vietnam War.

After his 24 years of service at NASA, Kraft consulted for IBM and Rockwell International, served as a director-at-large of the Houston Chamber of Commerce and as a member of the Board of Visitors at Virginia Tech. In 2001, he published an autobiography entitled “Flight: My Life in Mission Control,” which became a New York Times bestseller.

For his contributions to the early space program, Kraft was awarded the NASA Outstanding Leadership Medal, four NASA Distinguished Service Medals and the 1979 Goddard Memorial Trophy bestowed by the National Space Club. In 1999, he was presented the Rotary National Award for Space Achievement (RNASA) for being a “driving force in the U.S. human spaceflight program, from its beginnings to the space shuttle era, a man whose accomplishments have become legendary.”

In April 2011, NASA named its Mission Control Center at the Johnson Space Center in Kraft’s honor. The Christopher C. Kraft, Jr., Mission Control Center continues to be active, operating after more than 50 years in support of space missions.

“I am pleased as I can be to have you name this building after me,” said Kraft at the time. “Not because it’s for me, but because it is for the flight control people and for those people here at the Johnson Space Center.”

Kraft is survived by his wife of 68 years, Betty Anne Turnbull and children Gordon and Kristi-Anne.

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The Chandrayaan-2 mission is officially off to a promising start, as India vies to become the fourth nation to land on the Moon.

The Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) launched the three-stage GSLV Mk-III rocket on Monday, July 22 at 2:43 p.m. local time from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre at Sriharikota, an island off the coast of Andhra Pradesh, according to a press release from the space agency. The rocket successfully deployed its cargo—the 3,840-kilogram (8,465-pound) Chandrayaan-2 spacecraft—into Earth orbit a short time later. ISRO says the spacecraft is in “good health” and moving in the “right direction,” as the Times of India reports.

The rocket was originally scheduled to go up on July 15, but ISRO had to cancel the launch due to technical issues. Yesterday’s successful effort was met with intense relief, after fears that the launch might not happen at all due to the technical snag and short launch window.

Over the next few days, mission controllers will use Chandrayaan-2’s onboard propulsion system to perform a series of orbital adjustments. The spacecraft is not taking a direct path to the Moon. Instead, it will perform a series of ever-widening Earth orbits until it’s far enough away to be captured by the Moon’s gravity. This process will take 48 days, after which time the spacecraft will be close enough to the Moon such that it can dispatch the Vikram lander to the lunar surface.

The Vikram lander, named in honor of Vikram Sarabhai, a pioneering figure in the Indian space program, will attempt to make a soft landing on September 7, 2019. The probe will descend toward the lunar surface at a rate of 2 meters per second (6.5 feet per second) and land on a high plain between two craters, Manzinus C and Simpelius N, at the Moon’s south pole region, according to an ISRO press kit.

If successful, India will become just the fourth country in the world to land a spacecraft on the Moon, the others being the U.S., the Soviet Union, and China. Earlier this year, Israel’s Beresheet Probe crashed on the Moon, dashing its hope to do the same. The Chandrayaan-2 mission will be the first to explore the Moon’s south pole region.

This is the second time India has sent a spacecraft to the Moon. In 2008, ISRO launched Chandrayaan-1, which involved a lunar orbit and an impactor, the latter of which deliberately crashed into the Moon.

Once on the lunar surface, the Chandrayaan-2 mission is expected to last for one lunar day, which is roughly equal to 14 Earth days. The Vikram lander will deploy Pragyan, a six-wheeled robotic vehicle (Pragyan means “wisdom” in Sanskrit). This rover will travel a maximum 500 meters (1,640 feet) from the landing site, moving at a rate of 1 centimeter (0.4 inches) per second. Neither Vikram nor Pragyan are equipped to survive the lunar night, in which temperatures can drop as low as -170 degrees Celsius (-274 degrees F).

During the 14 Earth days in which Pragyan will be active, the rover will use its onboard particle x-ray spectrometer and laser spectroscope to study the chemical composition of the lunar surface near the landing site. Meanwhile, the Vikram lander will try to detect moonquakes, measure the Moon’s thermal conductivity (the degree to which the lunar surface can conduct electricity), and study the lunar ionosphere (the zone that’s ionized by solar and cosmic radiation). Vikram will be able to communicate with Pragyan, the Chandrayaan-2 lunar orbiter, and mission controllers back on Earth.

As for the Chandrayaan-2 orbiter, it will function in lunar orbit for about one year, and it will observe the surface from a height of around 100 kilometers (60 miles). The orbiter is equipped with a suite of instruments that will allow for topographical scans of the lunar surface, measurements of the Moon’s chemical composition, and surveys of lunar minerals and (possibly) water. The orbiter will also study the Sun with a solar x-ray monitor. Happily, the orbiter is also equipped with a high-resolution camera, so we should get to see some fantastic photos of the Moon’s south pole region. In all, the Chandrayaan-2 mission involves 13 different elements, all of which were developed in-house by ISRO.

Indeed, this is very much a “we did it ourselves” mission for India. The country is striving to become a space power in its own right, and it hopes to show the world that it can do a lot more than just launch satellites into space.

In March of this year, India purposefully shot down one of its own satellites to showcase its growing influence in space. Looking ahead, a third Chandrayaan mission is scheduled for sometime around 2023 or 2024 (possibly in conjunction with JAXA, Japan’s space agency). There’s even talk of putting astronauts in space by 2022 and sending a probe to Venus by 2023.

“India wants to show, especially since Prime Minister [Narendra] Modi came into office, that India is a major power, and that India has to be treated as a major Indo-Pacific power,” Rajeswari Pillai Rajagopalan, head of the nuclear and space policy initiative at the Observer Research Foundation, told CNN.

But this is all for the future. For now, India still needs to safely place the Vikram lander on the lunar surface, a feat scheduled for September 7. As Israel learned earlier this year, nothing should be taken for granted. Space, as it’s often said, is hard.