This year marks the 100th anniversary of the birth of Christopher Columbus Kraft Jr., a Hampton native and a pioneering engineer who became known as “The Father of NASA Mission Control.”
Monday, the Hampton History Museum will have a talk and tour of the exhibit “Chris Kraft: Hampton’s Unlikely Space Hero.” Allen Hoilman, the museum’s deputy director and curator, will discuss Kraft’s accomplishments and Hampton’s integral role in the Space Race of the 1950s and ’60s.
Kraft was born in Phoebus and attended Hampton High School and Virginia Polytechnic Institute (now Virginia Tech) before working at Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory (now NASA Langley Research Center) in 1945. In 1958, he was assigned to a group to develop manned space flight – putting a man in space and bringing him home safely. Kraft was a central figure in projects Mercury, Gemini and Apollo.
He led the development of the operations control system, Mission Control. He became the flight director, responsible for the flight components of the missions near Earth and in space. He was named director of the Johnson Space Center in Houston in 1972 and retired in 1982. After Kraft died in 2019, his family donated to the museum a collection of personal memorabilia that he’d saved from growing up in Hampton and his career at NASA.
The exhibit will be open through March 2.
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If you go
When: 7 to 8 p.m. Monday
Where: Hampton History Museum, 120 Old Hampton Lane
Tickets: Free for museum members; others, $5
Details: hamptonhistorymuseum.org
