J. C. Fletcher; Headed NASA Before, After Space Disaster

James C. Fletcher, who twice led NASA in troubled times, including after the Challenger shuttle disaster in 1986, died Sunday of cancer, a nephew said.

He was 72.

Fletcher, who had lived in suburban McLean, Va., since his most recent retirement from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, served on the boards of several corporations and held a part-time teaching job at the University of Pittsburgh, his family said.

Fletcher first served as NASA administrator from April, 1971, to May, 1977. When he assumed the post, the space agency’s support in Congress had lagged because of costly flights late in the Apollo program.

With its annual budget slashed on Capitol Hill from $6 billion to $3 billion, Fletcher proposed rejuvenating the nation’s space program with a “space shuttle,” a vehicle that could take off like a rocket, orbit like a spacecraft and return to Earth like a commercial jetliner.

He persuaded President Richard Nixon to support the idea, prompting the President to say at the time: “This system would help transform the space frontier of the 1970s into familiar territory, easily accessible for human endeavor in the 1980s and ‘90s.”

With the shuttle program under way several years later, Fletcher stepped down.

But in May, 1986, after the Challenger accident the previous January that claimed the lives of seven astronauts, President Ronald Reagan asked Fletcher to return to the job until the shuttle program was restored.

Fletcher said at the time he was taking the job reluctantly, but that he felt an obligation to help the agency in a time of trouble.

In his second term, Fletcher supervised NASA’s effort to redesign the flawed rocket engine that caused the Challenger accident and helped develop a new management system that put greater emphasis on quality control and safety for the shuttle program.

He submitted his final resignation from NASA in a letter to President Bush on March 21, 1989--just three days after the third successful post-Challenger flight. He told Bush he felt the President could “safely place the leadership of NASA in another’s hands.”

With a total of nine years spread over two tenures, Fletcher was NASA administrator longer than any other person.

A physicist by training, Fletcher worked in Southern California after World War II on guided missile systems. He and an associate, Frank A. Lehan, formed a company--Space Electronics Corp.--in Glendale to make components for space instruments and communications equipment.

In 1961, the company was merged with the spacecraft division of Aerojet-General to form Space General Corp.

He resigned from the company in 1964 to become the eighth president of the Mormon-founded University of Utah in his native state.