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Chris Kraft, 1st Flight Director for NASA, Dies at 95

Associated Press

   WASHINGTON - Behind America's late leap into orbit and triumphant small
   step on the moon was the agile mind and guts-of-steel of Chris Kraft,
   making split-second decisions that propelled the nation to once
   unimaginable heights.

   Kraft, the creator and longtime leader of NASA's Mission Control, died
   Monday in Houston, just two days after the 50th anniversary of what was
   his and NASA's crowning achievement: Apollo 11's moon landing. He was
   95.

   Christopher Columbus Kraft Jr. never flew in space, but "held the
   success or failure of American human spaceflight in his hands," Neil
   Armstrong, the first man-on-the-moon, told The Associated Press in
   2011.

   Kraft founded Mission Control and created the job of flight director --
   later comparing it to an orchestra conductor -- and established how
   flights would be run as the space race between the U.S. and Soviets
   heated up. The legendary engineer served as flight director for all of
   the one-man Mercury flights and seven of the two-man Gemini flights,
   helped design the Apollo missions that took 12 Americans to the moon
   from 1969 to 1972 and later served as director of the Johnson Space
   Center until 1982, overseeing the beginning of the era of the space
   shuttle.

   Armstrong once called him "the man who was the 'Control' in Mission
   Control."