NASA Shuttle Investigator to Head Marshall Facility

NASA today announced the appointment of James R. Thompson, an engineer who helped lead the space agency’s investigation into the Challenger disaster, to head the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala.

Thompson, 50, a Princeton University scientist, served as vice chairman of the NASA task force that investigated the explosion of the space shuttle. That task force assisted the presidential commission that examined the disaster.

He will begin work as director of the Marshall Center in late September, NASA Administrator James C. Fletcher said.

Thompson replaces William R. Lucas as head of the NASA center that supervises shuttle rockets.

Lucas, 64, had headed Marshall since 1974 and retired last month in a shake-up of key space officials.

Under Lucas’ leadership, Marshall engineers supervised Morton Thiokol’s development of the solid-fuel booster rockets, which the presidential commission blamed in its report on the Jan. 28 explosion.

Thompson has been deputy director for technical operations at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory since April, 1983. Before that, he spent 23 years with NASA at Marshall, where he managed development of the space shuttle’s main engines, NASA said. He also worked on the Skylab program and was associate director of engineering for the center.

“I view his appointment as another positive step in the process of safely returning the space shuttle to flight,” Fletcher said in a written statement.