The Houston Chronicle recently spent some time with NASA legend Dr. Chris Kraft, and the man who oversaw NASA's first steps into space didn't have many complimentary things to say about the things NASA has done lately—or the things it has on the drawing board.

Kraft, who will be 90 next February, is directly responsible for the initial shape and structure of NASA's flight controller hierarchy, and he sat at the flight director's console for all of Project Mercury. In 1982, he formally retired from his position as director of NASA's Johnson Space Center (JSC) in Houston, but he has never been shy to speak his mind about manned space flight. Among the topics drawing fire in the Chronicle interview are NASA's asteroid landing plans, the upcoming Space Launch System heavy-lift rocket, and the eventual goal of landing on Mars.

The Space Launch System, or SLS, is currently one of NASA's main priorities. It's been derisively referred to as the "Senate Launch System" in a lot of places, because it's being designed and built in a very distributed manner, with work being spread across many different contractors in many different states. "The problem with the SLS is that it's so big—that makes it very expensive," Kraft explained. "When they actually start to develop it, the budget is going to go haywire. They're going to have all kinds of technical and development issues crop up, which will drive the development costs up... So what you've got is a beast of a rocket that would give you all of this capability, which you can't build because you don't have the money to build it in the first place, and you can't operate it if you had it."

Kraft is derisive of new heavy lift capability, stating that instead of focusing on the ability to lift cargo 120 tons at a time—one of SLS' primary goals—NASA should use existing launch vehicles with lower payload capacities and lower operational costs, like Atlas, Delta, and the European Ariane. "We've got those smarts, we've learned that, we have that institutional knowledge, and yet we're ignoring it," he laments. "It's a tragedy. It really is."

Kraft was also quick to dismiss NASA's current asteroid hunting plans, instead favoring the establishment of a more permanent presence on the moon. "Congress is already saying what NASA is doing is wrong. They're saying they don't like the asteroid mission. Most in Congress want to see NASA go back to the moon. So do nearly all of the scientific and technical organizations in the world," said Kraft.

A simple return to the moon to plant more flags and make more footprints, though, is not what Kraft has in mind. Instead, he envisions an operational factory producing solar panels to harvest energy. "You could provide enough electrical power on the moon from solar cells, and eventually you could supply enough power for half the people on Earth with a solar cell farm on the moon," he said. Kraft is also quick to point out that such a return should be a joint venture between NASA and other space agencies rather than NASA operating on its own; this is coming at a time when the partner relationships that made the International Space Station possible are beginning to crumble.

But Kraft's harshest words are directed right where they should be: at the top. "Bolden," said Kraft of NASA administrator Charles Bolden, "doesn't know what it takes to do a major project. He doesn't have experience with that. He's never known what it takes to do a massive program. He keeps talking about going to Mars in the 2030s, but that's pure, unadulterated, BS."

To Kraft, the manned Mars landing is a mission without a purpose. "Pretty much everything we need to do on Mars can be done robotically. We've already got robots there. By the time we get the capability to send humans to Mars, it might be that robots are smarter than humans anyway."

Kraft made it clear that he's not in favor of abandoning the manned exploration of space, but he said that astronauts and engineers need to have a goal that makes sense. Manned space exploration is historically a field where years must be given over to the accomplishment of goals, and in order to give that much of themselves, the people behind the effort must be able to derive a sense of purpose from the work.

"You go talk to the guys who were doing Constellation," he said, referring to NASA's abandoned post-shuttle plans, "and the reason they came to NASA was to go back to the moon. They're all leaving now... because there's no future that they want to be involved in. And that's unfortunate. You've got to have a reason for people to give you their lives. Which is what I did. I gave NASA my life not because they asked me to, but because I wanted to."

"If you really want to go somewhere," he continued, "get out of this solar system. Eventually that's what you're going to have to do. I don't know how to do that, but we'll figure out how to do it one day."

Listing image by Lee Hutchinson