Chris Kraft said
he managed space
flights the way a
conductor leads an
orchestra. In the late 1950s and
early ’60s, the detail-obsessed
engineer created NASA’s Mission
Control, giving a ground-based
director—not an astronaut
rocketing upward at 7 miles
per second—ultimate authority over every pro-
cess from liftoff to splashdown. Kraft served
as NASA’s first flight director, making the “go,
no-go” calls that would shoot astronauts to their
glory or their doom. Famously cool under pres-
sure, Kraft insisted everyone obey his commands.
When astronaut Ed White lingered and enjoyed
the scenery during the first U.S. spacewalk in
1965, Kraft ordered him to “get back in!” the
ship. “This is the saddest day of my life,” White
replied. Kraft was in the control room when
Apollo 11 touched down on the moon in 1969,
and he helped devise the plan that saved the crew
of the crippled Apollo 13 the following year. He
said he never wanted to be an astronaut. “I liked
my job better than theirs,” Kraft explained. “I
got to tell them what to do.”
Christopher Columbus Kraft Jr. was born in
Phoebus, Va., said the Houston Chronicle. His
adventurer’s name came from his father, “whohad been born just before
Columbus Day in 1892.” Kraft
studied aeronautical engineer-
ing at Virginia Tech and then
joined NASA’s predecessor
agency in Langley, Va. When
the Soviets launched the first
Sputnik satellite in 1957 and
opened the space race, Kraft
was assigned to a new NASA
team tasked “with putting America’s first man
into space,” said The Times (U.K.). Working on
flight plans at Cape Canaveral, Fla., he soon real-
ized that astronauts would be overwhelmed by
the necessary computations. “There needs to be
someone [on the ground] in charge of the flights,”
he told NASA, “and I want to be that person.”
When President John F. Kennedy announced in
1961 that the U.S. would put a man on the moon
by the end of the decade, Kraft was “paralyzed
with shock,” said The Washington Post. Yet he
helped persuade NASA to try a “daring moon
orbit” with Apollo 8 on Christmas Eve 1968,
paving the way for Apollo 11’s triumphant lunar
landing. After a decade directing the Johnson
Space Center in Houston, where the control
room bears his name, Kraft retired from NASA
in 1982. He later wrote of his longing for “a
visionary president to declare that Americans will
land on Mars. And then make it happen.”Rutger Hauer’s brood-
ing intensity and
otherworldly bearing
made him the perfect
Hollywood villain. Standing 6-foot-1,
with rough-hewn features and pierc-
ing blue eyes, the Dutch actor played
a charismatic terrorist in the 1981
thriller Nighthawks, a psychopathic
hitchhiker in the 1986 slasher film
The Hitcher, and numerous Nazis
and vampires. But his most famous role was as
Roy Batty, the leader of a gang of bioengineered
androids who rebel against their human creators
in the 1982 sci-fi thriller Blade Runner. There was
nothing robotic about Hauer’s performance—with
a few lines, he rendered his killer “replicant” pain-
fully human. In the film’s climactic scene, a dying
Batty describes the interstellar wonders he’s seen,
lamenting that “all those moments will be lost in
time, like tears in rain.” Hauer shaped that now
iconic monologue, paring it down from a lengthy
soliloquy into a few short sentences and adding
the indelible final words. “Part of the freedom that
you have as a bad guy,” said Hauer, “is that you
can go anywhere, try anything.”
Hauer was born in the Netherlands to actor
parents, said The Times (U.K.). At first, Hauershunned the family business, run-
ning away from home at age 15 to
serve on a freighter in the Dutch
Merchant Navy. After a year sail-
ing around the world, he returned
home and enrolled in acting school,
but soon dropped out to join
the army—a decision “he almost
instantly came to regret when he
refused training in the use of deadly
weapons.” Declared mentally unfit
and discharged, Hauer “took up acting again in
earnest,” said The Guardian (U.K.). His role as a
Robin Hood–like character in the 1969 Dutch TV
series Floris made “him a star in his homeland.”
But he remained relatively unknown elsewhere.
Blade Runner made Hauer “a staple of action
and horror films, if never quite a star,” said The
Washington Post. He didn’t always play villains.
He won a Golden Globe for Best Supporting Actor
playing a Jewish resistance fighter in the 1987 TV
movie Escape From Sobibor. Despite his more
fearsome roles, off screen Hauer was a peace-
loving environmentalist who supported Greenpeace
and established an AIDS awareness charity. “That
young boy who sailed the seas is still here with
me,” Hauer said earlier this year. “And he’s saying
this about my life: ‘That was awesome.’”Obituaries
Rutger
Hauer
1944–2019AP, Everett Collection
The NASA visionary who led Mission Control
The gentle actor who excelled in bad-guy roles
Chris
Kraft
1924–2019 In the 1950s, a young
Russi Taylor was visiting
Disneyland with her mom
when she noticed Walt
Disney sitting alone on a
bench. The
pair went
over, offered
the anima-
tion legend
some popcorn, and struck
up a conversation. He asked
little Russi what she wanted
to do when she grew up.
“I want to work for you,”
she replied. That childhood
ambition came true in 1986,
when Taylor beat 200 other
voice actresses to become
the squeaky voice of Minnie
Mouse for a new film, Totally
Minnie. She would play
Minnie in TV shows and
movies and at theme park
experiences for more than
30 years, and bring many
other Disney characters to
life, including Donald Duck’s
nephews, Huey, Dewey,
and Louie, in the TV series
DuckTales. “I never wanted to
be famous,” Taylor said. “The
characters I do are famous,
and that’s fine for me.”
Born in Cambridge, Mass.,
Taylor got her first voice-
over job in the 1970s playing
“members of Geoffrey the
Giraffe’s family” in a Toys R
Us ad, said Slate.com. She
developed a particular skill
for mimicking babies: She
was the voice of Ted and
Georgette’s squalling infant
in The Mary Tyler Moore
Show, and a screaming nest
of maggots in the 1998 Pixar
movie A Bug’s Life. Perhaps
her most famous non-Disney
role was “Martin Prince, the
overly enthusiastic teacher’s
pet on TV’s The Simpsons.”
In a fairy-tale twist worthy of
a Disney movie, Taylor in 1991
married her co-star Wayne
Allwine, “the voice of Mickey
Mouse,” said The Times
(U.K.). At the time, the couple
tried to keep their wedding
under wraps. They didn’t, she
explained, want the media to
say, “‘Oh, Mickey and Minnie
got married.’ It wasn’t Mickey
and Minnie; it was Wayne
and Russi.”Russi
Taylor
1944–201935
The voice actress
who brought Minnie
Mouse to life