Reagan Persuades Fletcher to Return as Head of NASA

Moving to stabilize the embattled National Aeronautics and Space Administration in the wake of the Challenger space shuttle disaster, President Reagan Thursday persuaded former agency administrator James C. Fletcher to return to the top NASA post, which he held for six years during the 1970s.

Fletcher, 66, who had said he would have to be “dragged kicking and screaming” into the job, had been at the top of the Administration’s list almost from the moment it began searching for a new administrator.

In the midst of a crisis for the U.S. space program, the announcement of Reagan’s choice for the post was remarkably low key. It came in the form of a five-paragraph statement from the White House press office without any comment from the President. Fletcher himself was out of the city and his wife said he was not expected home until Saturday.

Although supporters of acting NASA Administrator William R. Graham had voiced muted objections to the choice of Fletcher, congressional sources predicted that the nomination would sail through the Senate with little difficulty.

It was quickly endorsed by Sen. Ernest F. Hollings (D-S.C.), a member of the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation subcommittee on science, technology and space, who had demanded a shake-up in the agency’s top management, and from Sen. Slade Gorton (R-Wash.), the subcommittee chairman.

“I know him and the 20,000 employees of NASA know him,” Hollings said. “He has the brains, he has the talent and he doesn’t need on-the-job training.”

Gorton said he and Sen. Jake Garn (R-Utah) had first recommended Fletcher to President Reagan several weeks ago. “Knowledge of the agency is critical to the ability of the new administration to return confidence and direction to a shaken group of people,” he said.

Fletcher headed NASA during the last years of the Apollo moon flights, the cooperative Apollo-Soyuz project with the Soviet Union and the design of the space shuttle. He left the agency after President Jimmy Carter took office.

For the last several years, he has been a consulting engineer and a professor at the University of Pittsburgh. Although Fletcher has repeatedly made it clear that he had no desire to resume his former duties at NASA, he said Thursday that, if the President told him he was needed to fill the void in the space agency’s time of trial, he would accept the responsibility.

The search for a new administrator in recent days had been narrowed to Fletcher and retired Air Force Chief of Staff Lew Allen Jr., who is now director of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena.

A Leadership Crisis

Since the Jan. 28 Challenger tragedy, NASA has had a leadership crisis. Administrator James M. Beggs, under indictment on charges of conspiring to defraud the federal government while an aerospace industry executive, was on leave of absence. Graham, the acting administrator, was lacking in experience.

Sources familiar with the search for a new NASA administrator said the only objection to Fletcher had come from Graham supporters who pointed out that Fletcher, a one-time president of the University of Utah, had headed NASA at the time when the space shuttle was designed and the contract for the solid-rocket boosters was awarded to Utah-based Morton Thiokol Inc.

Administration and congressional sources said it is necessary to resolve the crisis in the space agency’s top management before taking up the major decision of whether to build a new space shuttle to replace Challenger.