In the accompanying article, he compared his role as flight director to that of a symphony conductor. “The conductor can’t play all the instruments—he may not even be able to play any one of them,” Kraft said. “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 drumming. He mixes all this up and out comes music. That’s what we do here.” The magazine noted that Kraft took “an almost angry pride in his work”—an assessment with which many at NASA agreed.
