鈥淕辞.鈥�
鈥淣o go.鈥�
鈥淲e have lift off.鈥�
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鈥淕o for trans-lunar injection.鈥�
鈥淗old at T-minus 30 seconds.鈥�
This is just some of the evocative and strangely reassuring jargon of the NASA mission controller. Such space-flight speak seems to flow so naturally during a rocket launch telecast that it is hard to imagine someone once had to invent this curious lexicon.
But they did 鈥� and the person largely credited with developing both it and the life-critical procedures that underpin it was Chris Kraft. Despite wanting to be a baseball player, Kraft ended up as a flight researcher at NASA鈥檚 predecessor, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA).
When NASA was formed in 1958, after the Soviet Union鈥檚 launch of Sputnik kicked off the space race, it was Kraft who established the space agency鈥檚 mission control operations from scratch.
But his name may be unfamiliar because, to many, the Apollo moon shots seemed to be choreographed, on the ground at least, by Gene Kranz, the waistcoat-wearing flight director with the military buzz cut. However, Kranz鈥檚 visibility on NASA鈥檚 shop floor 鈥� especially during the Apollo 11 moon landing and Apollo 13 rescue 鈥� was more related to Kraft having been moved upstairs by the time TV cameras watched Apollo missions fly.
Now Kraft鈥檚 contribution, and those of the many flight controllers who worked under him, have been brought into sharp relief in a beautifully shot, feature-length documentary, , directed by David Fairhead, and produced by Keith Haviland and Gareth Dodds.
All three are veteran creators of space documentary movies: Fairhead was an editor on the 2014 biopic The Last Man on the Moon about astronaut Gene Cernan, while Haviland and Dodds were producers.
Moon mission tales
Here they have interviewed a clutch of former flight controllers, including Kraft, now 93, gleaning a fascinating collection of moon mission reminiscences and tales of astonishing teamwork under life-threatening pressures. In it, Kranz also pays due credit to Kraft as both his mentor and the brains behind mission control operations.
Set to an atmospheric score and with striking CGI recreations of Apollo mission events, Fairhead鈥檚 film is hugely watchable.
It also highlights starkly the magnitude of the task facing Kraft back in 1958: he had to puzzle out, from first principles, how a spacecraft circling the globe at five miles per second could be tracked, monitored and stay in touch with NASA.
What sounds like an easy task today was not then, when there were no communications satellites or GPS to help out. But Kraft reveals that it was his supersonic flight-tracking experience that helped him propel NASA into orbital operations.
At NACA, Kraft and his colleagues had been responsible for flight testing the Bell X-1, the air-dropped, rocket-powered plane that broke the sound barrier, at Edwards Air Force Base in California. In those tests, ground control used radar to track the plane and radio telemetry to monitor the readiness and flight performance of the X-1, as well as the health of the pilot, Chuck Yeager.
That, says Kraft, became his model for space-flight mission control 鈥� but on a global scale, requiring a network of ground-based radar tracking and communications dishes girdling the planet.
Tragedy led to triumph
However, while Kraft鈥檚 mission control succeeded on NASA鈥檚 first manned-flight programmes 鈥� Mercury and Gemini 鈥� it hit the buffers, along with the rest of the agency, when three Apollo 1 astronauts died in a launch-pad fire in January 1967. The deep regret the mission controllers express over those deaths, and the way they explain the sheer danger in which the crew had been placed (in a system that just wasn鈥檛 ready) is heartbreaking.
Kraft says, however, that they would never have got astronauts to the moon without the 20-month hiatus that let NASA re-engineer the Apollo capsule and the agency鈥檚 procedures. 鈥淭hat interim period saved our ass,鈥� he says.
The film also highlights the remarkable variety of backgrounds the Apollo mission controllers hailed from: for example, one had escaped a domineering, alcoholic father, while another hailed from a hick farm. But, as footage shows, they were pretty much all chain-smokers. They were also all male. However, we do get to hear from some of today鈥檚 female mission controllers, too, showing that the Apollo era鈥檚 antediluvian gender attitudes are consigned to history.
Unsung heroes like Kraft and his colleagues are popular in space-flight movies right now: the Oscar-nominated Hidden Figures lauded the talented black women who聽 聽computed rocket trajectories for Project Mercury but got none of the credit. However, , those women were not so much hidden as unseen.
Indeed, US President Richard Nixon credited some 400,000 people 鈥� at NASA and hundreds of nationwide contractors 鈥� for helping put Neil Armstrong鈥檚 boots in the moon dust.
So we can probably expect to see more documentary movies focusing on different, as-yet-uncelebrated aspects of US space flight. Bring them on. Or, as mission control might say, go at throttle up.
can be downloaded on iTunes, streamed from on-demand services or watched at US movie theatres from 14 April
