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Back of all Kraft's unforgiving perfectionism is always the knowledge that the final decision, the final responsibility, is usually his alone. "He's a virtual dictator," says Gene Kranz, the other deputy flight director, "which is the way it has to be." Kraft prefers to think of himself as conductor of a symphony orchestra. "The conductor," he says, "can't play all the instrument−she may not even be able to play any one of them. But he knows when the first violin should be playing, and he knows when the trumpets should be loud or soft, and when the drummer should be drum ming. He mixes all this up and out comes music. That's what we do here."
Practiced Precision. To match his own quick, cool confidence, Kraft has gathered and trained a young (average age: 30), dedicated staff of 568 men−mostly engineers, mathematicians and physicists. For their new profession, they have an appropriately new name: aerospace technology. They take for granted long hours and many weekends on the job; their dedication can be measured by the fact that of the 500 employees who were in space-flight operations last year, only 27 have left. Of that number, only two men have left NASA altogether.
Controllers are split into three self-contained teams to keep a round-the-clock vigil. Kraft serves as flight director on the red team, which handles both launch and reentry; he is always on call in a crisis when either the blue team, headed by John Hodge, 36, a British-born engineer and sometime glider pilot, or the white team, led by Aeronautical Engineer Eugene F. Kranz, 32, is on duty.
Working together with practiced precision, all of the teams stick to Kraft's patient maxim and do nothing when in doubt. But when the occasion demands, they are capable of making and executing quick decisions. During the powered phase of the unmanned Gemini 2 launch early this year, power at the old Cape blockhouse control room went dead. Kraft himself was in command, and he wasted not a moment alerting the tracking ship, Rose Knot, some 500 miles east of the Cape. "RKV," he snapped into the mike, "you're prime on control. We've had a power failure." About 45 seconds later, power was restored, and Kraft's control of the flight went on successfully.
Impromptu Art. On almost every mission, such split-second decisions occasionally make space-flight control seem an impromptu art, a creation of the moment−or at least of the mission at hand. But while its rules trace back to the earliest Mercury flights, its practice goes back even further, to the X-1 experimental rocket plane tests conducted by the Air Force at Edwards A.F.B. in 1947. In those days, to be sure, the control center was nothing but a radio mounted on a Jeep. Later, telemetry was added, and for the X-15s, ground control was run from three stations across Nevada. At each step along the way, a young aeronautical engineer named Chris Kraft was contributing to the program with his work at Langley Field, Va., then a laboratory for the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA). He was learning his trade, acting as if the thought of doing anything else had never entered his mind.