Career
During his first administration at NASA, Dr. Fletcher was responsible beginning the Shuttle effort, as well as the Viking program that sent landers to Mars. During his second tenure, he presided over the effort to recover from the Challenger accident. Indeed, he oversaw or initiated virtually every major space project of the last two decades. Although the missions were planned before he took over, he was Administrator during the three Skylab missions in 1973 and 1974 and the two Viking probes that landed on Mars in 1976. He also approved the Voyager space probe to the outer planets, the Hubble Space Telescope program, and the Apollo-Soyuz mission, which in 1975 linked American astronauts and Soviet cosmonauts in space.
During his second administration at NASA, Fletcher was largely involved in efforts to recover from the Challenger accident. With the accident, the Shuttle program went into a two-year hiatus while NASA worked to redesign the solid rocket boosters and revamp its management structure. Fletcher ensured that NASA reinvested heavily in the program's safety and reliability, made organizational changes to improve efficiency, and restructured its management system. Most important, he oversaw a complete reworking of the components of the Shuttle to enhance its safety and added an egress method for the astronauts. A critical decision resulting from the accident and its aftermath--during which the nation experienced a reduction in capability to launch satellites--was to expand greatly the use of expendable launch vehicles. He was in charge of the agency when the Space Shuttle finally returned to flight on September 29, 1988.