Hardcover. 8vo. Published by E P Dutton, New York. 2001. 370 pgs.

Hardcover. 8vo. Published by E P Dutton, New York. 2001. 370 pgs. Illustrated. Signed and inscribed by Chris Kraft to NACA test pilot Steve (Stefan) Cavallo on the half-title page. First Edition/First Printing. DJ has light shelf-wear present to the DJ extremities. Bound in cloth boards with titles present to the spine and front board. Boards have light shelf-wear present to the extremities. No ownership marks present. Text is clean and free of marks. Binding tight and solid. Besides the astronauts, Kraft was one of NASA's best-known personalities in the agency's heroic decade of the 1960s, once making the cover of Time. The blunt-speaking demeanor that made Kraft popular with the press is fully present in his memoir, in which he lets fly about various instances of his dissatisfaction with the performance of an astronaut, engineer, or contractor. Such dirty-laundry airing, verboten at the time by the publicity-conscious NASA, is one reason for space-history buffs to flock to Kraft's narrative, but the principal attraction is how he ramped up from scratch the flight control operation for Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo. When Sputnik beeped the U. S. Into a panic, Kraft was an engineer at the obscure National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), quickly revamped as NASA. Tapped by the unsung organizer of manned flight, Robert Gilruth, to establish what became Mission Control, Kraft directed the early flights, whose participants he critiques by his lights as a no-nonsense engineer. His key role and frankness of recollection make Kraft a worthy memoirist of pioneering space flight. C2a; 6.5 X 1.25 X 9.5 inches; 370 pages.