Christopher Columbus Kraft Jr. was an American aerospace engineer and NASA engineer and manager. He was responsible for shaping the organization and culture of NASA’s Mission Control. In 2011, the Mission Control Center building was name after him. He retired from NASA in 1982 and later consulted for numerous companies, including IBM and Rockwell International. He died in 2013 at age 89.
About Christopher C. Kraft Jr. in brief
Christopher Columbus Kraft Jr. was an American aerospace engineer and NASA engineer and manager. He was responsible for shaping the organization and culture of NASA’s Mission Control. Kraft was named after his father, Christopher Columbus Kraft, who was born in New York City in 1892 near the newly renamed Columbus Circle. In 2011, the Mission Control Center building was name after him. He retired from NASA in 1982 and later consulted for numerous companies, including IBM and Rockwell International, and published an autobiography entitled Flight: My Life in Mission Control, published by Simon & Schuster. He died at the age of 89 in 2013. He is buried in Arlington, Virginia, with his wife, Vanda Olivia Kraft, and their two children, Christopher, Jr. and Christopher III, who were born in 1943 and 1944, respectively. He also leaves behind a son, Christopher Jr., who is also a former NASA engineer, and a son-in-law, Christopher J. Kraft, Jr., a former astronaut and NASA manager. His grandson, Christopher K. Kraft III, is the son of former NASA administrator Michael Kraft and former NASA chief of mission control, Robert R. Gilruth. Kraft is survived by his wife and four children. He had a son and a daughter with his second wife, Susan Kraft, a former spaceflight engineer, who died in 2010. He has a son with his third wife, Barbara Kraft, as well as a stepson, Michael K. K. Jr., and a stepdaughter, Jennifer Kraft, both of whom have served in the U.S. Air Force. Kraft died in 2013 at age 89.
He leaves behind two sons, Christopher III and Christopher IV, and two daughters, Jennifer K. and Jennifer L. Kraft-Kraft, all of whom are still active in the aerospace industry. Kraft worked for over a decade in aeronautical research before being asked in 1958 to join the Space Task Group, a small team entrusted with the responsibility of putting America’s first man in space. Assigned to the flight operations division, Kraft became NASA’s first flight director. At the beginning of the Apollo program, Kraft retired as a flight director to concentrate on management and mission planning. In 1972, he became director of the Manned Spacecraft Center, following in the footsteps of his mentor Robert R.-Gilruth, and held the position until his 1982 retirement from NASA. In 1957, Kraft started thinking about a change of course for the United States. He discovered that Russian Sputnik 1 prompted the change of career. He later discovered that the wingtip vortices, and not propwash, are responsible for most of the turbulence in the air that trails that aircraft flying in the skies. His work on the X-1 rocket plane led to the development of an early example of air deflecting systems for aircraft. In 1999, Kraft received the National Space Trophy from the Rotary Club in 1999, the organization described him as \”a driving force in the human space flight program from its beginnings to the Space Shuttle era, a man whose accomplishments have become legendary. \”
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