Fletcher, Ex-NASA Chief, Is Likely to Return to Job

With announcement of a new chief of the troubled National Aeronautics and Space Administration expected this week, the leading candidate is still James C. Fletcher, who headed NASA when the space shuttle program was undertaken 14 years ago, Administration sources said Saturday.

Fletcher’s name was first reported to be at the top of the list by The Times on Feb. 15. The Administration officials, who refused to be identified, confirmed that Fletcher will be first choice on a list of several candidates to be presented to President Reagan on Monday, even though Fletcher has said several times that he would take the job only under duress.

Fletcher was interviewed last week by White House Chief of Staff Donald T. Regan. Another senior Administration official described the former administrator and former University of Utah president as “the candidate with far and away the most support.”

Management Disarray

“We need somebody who knows the agency and who can get over there and get started fast,” the official said, referring to the management disarray that has existed since the loss of the shuttle Challenger on Jan. 28.

James M. Beggs, who is under indictment on charges unrelated to the space program, resigned as administrator last week after being on leave of absence for several weeks, leaving William R. Graham, an agency newcomer, as acting director.

White House officials said Saturday that Graham has been told that he also is under consideration for the administrator’s post, but that the notification was pro forma, that Graham is not, in fact, seriously in the running.

Undersecretary of the Air Force Edward C. Aldridge Jr.; Gen. Lew Allen Jr., retired chief of staff of the Air Force, who is now director of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and former Sen. Harrison H. Schmitt (R-N.M.), a onetime astronaut, are understood to be other candidates under consideration.

The White House has discussed the post with both Aldridge and Schmitt. Allen is understood to have told friends that he has no interest in the NASA job.

As the search for a new administrator went on Saturday, the space agency announced that James T. Thompson, 49, a deputy director of Princeton University’s plasma physics laboratory, would take the leadership of day-to-day operations of the NASA task force studying the Challenger accident and supporting the work of the presidential investigating commission headed by former Secretary of State William P. Rogers.

Associate Administrator Richard H. Truly, the new chief of the shuttle program and head of the task force, also said he had organized the NASA task force to parallel the structure of the Rogers commission. Four separate analysis teams, he said, had been established: project analysis, launch systems and processing, failure analysis and mission operations analysis.

Thompson spent 21 years with the space agency before assuming his post at Princeton. He was for several years the manager of development of the space shuttle’s main engines. Later, he was in charge of the Skylab program and associate director for engineering at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala. Fletcher, who headed the space agency from 1971 to 1977, could not be reached Saturday for comment on the prospect of his return to the agency.

Administration sources said conservatives eager to see the post go to Graham have suggested that Fletcher would have difficulty receiving Senate confirmation because he was at NASA at the time the design of the space shuttle was selected and at the time the contract for the shuttle’s solid booster rockets was awarded to Morton Thiokol Inc.

But White House officials said Fletcher has broad bipartisan support in Congress.