Christopher C. Kraft Jr. — NASA’s first flight director and a legendary scientist who helped build the nation’s space program — died Monday, just two days after the world celebrated the historic Apollo 11 walk on the moon. He was 95.

“#RIP Dr. Christopher Kraft,” former astronaut Clayton Anderson posted on Twitter about 3:30 p.m. Monday. “You were a true leader for this nation and our world …Godspeed and thank you.”

Kraft’s name is emblazoned in bold letters on the side of the mission control building at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, home to the base of operations where Kraft guided astronauts from launch to landing as the organization grew to a full-blown agency that required multiple flight directors to oversee a mission.

The late Apollo 11 astronaut Neil Armstrong once said Kraft was “the ‘control’ in mission control.”

In an interview in February with the Houston Chronicle, Kraft said he never wanted to be an astronaut.

“I liked my job better than theirs,” he said. “I got to go on every flight, and besides that, I got to tell them what to do.”

During an era with no calculators and only rudimentary computers, Kraft essentially built NASA’s mission control to manage human operations in space. As the agency’s sole flight director, with a simple black-and-white monitor and listening to eight different communications loops, he had the final say for NASA’s first five manned missions, including the Mercury flights of Alan Shepard and John Glenn.

As NASA scrambled to catch the Soviet Union in space during the late 1950s and early 1960s, Kraft wrote mission rules and operating procedures for America’s early forays into space. Later, during the Gemini program, Kraft recruited and developed a team of flight directors, allowing him to move into planning for the Apollo moon mission.

“Dr. Kraft is one of the founding fathers of the space age,” Wayne Hale, a flight director for more than three dozen shuttle missions, and later the space shuttle program manager, said previously. “He was one of the indispensable men that made Apollo happen. He invented flight directing out of thin air and created this whole new enterprise in such a way that we still follow the model he set.”

On Monday afternoon, Hale tweeted out, “A giant has left us: Chris Kraft is one with the ages.”

His condition apparently had worsened as celebrations continued Saturday for the 50th anniversary of the historic lunar landing.

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

A quirk of history

Born Feb. 28, 1924, in Virginia, Kraft received an auspicious name for someone who would lead America into undiscovered frontiers. He was named for his father, who had been born just before Columbus Day in 1892. He became Christopher Columbus Kraft Jr.

“Can a name influence the course of a life?” Kraft asked in his memoir, “Flight.” “I’ve had most of a century to ponder that question.”

He earned a bachelor’s degree in aeronautical engineering from Virginia Polytechnic Institute, now known as Virginia Tech, and State University in 1944.

But for a quirk of history, he might never have ended up at NASA. He initially accepted a job offer from Chance Vought, an aircraft company that specialized in fighter planes for the U.S. Navy. But his birth certificate was delayed, causing his hiring to be put off, and instead he accepted a job at Langley Aeronautical Laboratory of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, the predecessor to NASA.

Then in 1958, he became one of the first 35 members of NASA’s Space Task Group planning Project Mercury — the country’s first human space flight effort. He designed the Apollo-era mission control room and shaped the concept of flight operations there.

“He always seemed to know what was over the horizon, what was coming,” Glynn Lunney, a NASA flight director during the Apollo era, said during a 2018 event at Space Center Houston, the visitors center at the Johnson Space Center.

Kraft was there in January 1961 when the first chimpanzee, Ham, was launched into space; he was there in May 1961 when Shepard became the first American in space; and he was there in February 1962 when Glenn became the first man to orbit the Earth.

And in July 1969, Kraft helped guide Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin’s touchdown on the moon.

“I always felt like it was my responsibility to provide a safe return for the astronaut,” he told the Chronicle in 2016. “That was my prime responsibility.”

Between 1969 and 1972, just 12 men walked on the moon — and Kraft helped them all from the Lone Star State. He spoke to the Chronicle several months before the moon landing anniversary, but he had not been present for the ongoing celebrations.

On HoustonChronicle.com: Read the Chronicle’s full coverage of the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing

Despite all his accolades, Kraft told the Chronicle that he “was no brilliant engineer.”

“I was a do-it guy,” he said. “I was a can-do guy.”

That’s certainly not how most people saw him, however.

“He seemed to have a sense of how to explain things: He was a great briefer,” Lunney said in 2018.

In 1972, Kraft became director of the entire Johnson Space Center, where mission control is located and where the nation’s astronaut corps lives and trains. He served in that role until 1982, when he retired from the agency.

The mission control building on the Johnson campus was named after him in 2011. At an April 2011 ceremony naming the building, then-Houston center director Michael Coats called Kraft a “space pioneer.”

“Without (him) we’d never have heard those historic words on the surface of the moon, ‘Houston, Tranquility base here. The Eagle has landed,’” Coats said. “Those words effectively put Houston, and this building behind us, on the intergalactic map forever.”

‘A great visionary’

The late-afternoon announcement Monday brought a flood of remembrances.

John Charles, a scientist who worked at NASA for 30 years, likened the magnitude of Kraft dying during the 50th anniversary week to that of Thomas Jefferson dying on the 50th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence.

“His strength of will and force of personality allowed him to learn lessons and make (mission control) better and better,” Charles, now scientist-in-residence at Space Center Houston, said Monday. Kraft “once again was exerting his force of will, this time to stay alive for the anniversary.”

NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine and Johnson Space Center Director Mark Geyer praised his impact on the space program.

“America has truly lost a national treasure today with the passing of one of NASA’s earliest pioneers,” Bridenstine said in a statement.

“Chris was a visionary, an American hero and a great leader,” Geyer tweeted.

Milt Heflin, who worked in mission control during the Apollo era and retired from NASA in 2013, said everyone in those days was aware of the legendary Kraft.

“It became obvious to me early on that, if a person was trying to convince him of something, that person better know their stuff and they need to come prepared,” Heflin said. “Dr. Kraft knew what he was talking about and he also knew how to get things done back then and how to make things happen.”

Kraft was the director when Herb Baker began working at the Houston center in the 1970s. Kraft was already a legend, even then, and everyone around him respected Kraft, said Baker, who is now retired from the space agency.

“I can’t think of a single person that didn’t have the highest respect for him — not a single one,” Baker, who is now retired from the space agency, said. “Everyone at that center loved and respected that man and knew what he had done and what he meant to the agency.”

Baker mourned his passing as well as others from that era.

“We’re losing so many of those legends and heroes,” he said. “Every one hurts just as much as the last one.”

Ed Van Cise, a current flight director at Johnson, said Kraft was “one of the giants on whose shoulders we stand.”

Kayla LaFrance, a mission controller at Johnson Space Center, paid respect on Twitter to the “forefather” of mission control.

“Chris Kraft was the mastermind behind Mission Control. He was our 1st Flight Director,” LaFrance tweeted. “I never met him, but heard him speak. He was a legend, someone to look up to. Someone to thank for what he gave to our country.

“Godspeed, Flight.”

Eric Berger, a former Chronicle reporter, is now senior space editor at Ars Technica.

alex.stuckey@chron.com