Richard Truly, a naval aviator and astronaut who flew on two early space shuttle missions and, as NASA’s associate administrator, guided the agency’s return to space after the Challenger disaster, died Feb. 27 at his home in Genesee, Colo. He is 86 years old.
The cause was atypical Parkinson’s disease, according to his wife, Colleen (Hanner) Truly.
Mr. Truly joined NASA in 1969, but he didn’t venture into space for 12 years, when he was the pilot of the shuttle program’s second orbital flight. The success of that flight proved that NASA could safely launch the Columbia shuttle, seven months after its first flight, and safely return it to earth.
The mission was supposed to last five days, but it was cut to two after one of Columbia’s fuel cells failed. (The Columbia disaster that killed a seven-person crew in 2003 occurred after Mr. Truly left NASA.)
In 1983, Mr. Truly, who was a captain at the time, commanded the Challenger on its third flight, the eighth overall in the shuttle program. It flew at night and landed in the dark — a first for the program. The flight also marked a personal distinction: Captain Truly was the first American grandfather in space.
Soon after, he retired from NASA to become the first commander of the Naval Space Command, which consolidated the Navy’s operations in space communications, navigation and surveillance.
But he returned to NASA as its associate administrator in charge of the shuttle program in 1986, less than a month after the Challenger broke up 73 seconds into its flight due to launch in too cold temperatures, killing its seven-person crew, which with a teacher, Christa McAuliffe.
A month into his new job, Captain Truly said that the next shuttle would only be launched in daylight and in warm weather (Challenger was launched at 36 degrees Fahrenheit), and that it would land in California instead of Cape Canaveral, Fla.
“I don’t want you to think that this conservative approach, this safe approach, which I think is the right thing to do, is going to be a namby-pamby shuttle program,” he said. “The business of space flight is a brave business.”
He added: “We cannot print enough money to make it completely risk-free. But we will certainly correct any mistakes we may have made in the past, and we will return it as soon as possible under the rules this.”
Captain Truly is also the chairman of NASA’s internal task force that provided support to the presidential commission investigating the Challenger disaster. But his main task was to get the shuttle program back into flight.
“He is widely recognized as having done an excellent job in that responsibility,” John Logsdon, a professor emeritus at the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University, said in an email.
The job took 32 months: Discovery’s launch on a four-day mission in late September 1988 ended a long period of depression and self-doubt for the agency.
“The country,” said Mr. Truly, then a vice admiral, “will have the shuttle as the backbone of its space program well into the next century.”
Richard Harrison Truly was born on Nov. 12, 1937, in Fayette, Miss. His father, James, is an attorney for the Federal Trade Commission. His mother, Jessie Smith (Sheehan) Truly, was a teacher. They separated when Richard was young.
Mr. Really didn’t grow up wanting to be an aviator; instead, he recalled, he dreamed of driving a fire truck. “I never really intended to be a pilot,” he said in a NASA oral history in 2003. “It never occurred to me that that was a possibility.”
He studied engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology on a Navy ROTC scholarship and became intrigued with aviation during two summers of Navy and Marine indoctrination. After graduating in 1959 with a bachelor’s degree in aeronautical engineering, he trained to become a naval aviator and was assigned to a fighter squadron.
Between 1960 and 1963, he made more than 300 landings, many of them at night, on the aircraft carriers Intrepid and Enterprise, then became a flight instructor.
In 1965, he was assigned to the Air Force’s Manned Orbiting Laboratory, a Cold War surveillance program that planned to send astronauts into orbit in a modified Gemini capsule connected to a cylindrical 50-foot-long laboratory. But the program was canceled in June 1969, and two months later, Mr. Truly was one of seven astronauts from that program to join NASA.
He worked on capsule communications for the manned Skylab and Apollo-Soyuz missions in the 1970s, after which he became a shuttle test pilot and backup pilot for the first shuttle mission in 1981.
He left NASA shortly after his second shuttle mission when John F. Lehman Jr., the secretary of the Navy, asked him to take over the newly formed Naval Space Command in Dahlgren, Va. While there, he was promoted to vice admiral.
But after the Challenger tragedy, Mr. Lehman and the White House prevailed to return to NASA. He recalled walking into his office on his first day as associate administrator to find people crying in the corridor “because of the battering they were getting in the media,” he said in 2012. lecture at the Colorado School of Mineswhere he was a trustee at the time.
“At that time,” he added, “rather than an airplane accident, it was presented as NASA killing its crew. It was the beginning of the most turbulent engineering, political, cultural, and social endeavor in which I found my self.”
After three years as associate administrator, Admiral Truly was named administrator, the space agency’s highest position, by President George HW Bush.
“This marks the first time in its distinguished history that NASA will be led by a hero of its own making, an astronaut who has been in space,” President Bush said at a news briefing.
But Admiral Truly’s three years at NASA were difficult. The agency has had problems with launch delays, leaking fuel shuttles and the discovery of a defective mirror on the Hubble Space Telescope.
He was eventually forced to resign after clashing over NASA’s direction with Vice President Dan Quayle and his staff at the National Space Council, where Mr. Quayle is the chairman.
Mr. Logsdon said senior NASA employees, aerospace contractors and congressional overseers offered positive assessments of Admiral Truly’s performance, but his tenure was viewed negatively by “reformers who believe NASA needs of fundamental change and decided that Truly was not the person to lead that change.”
After leaving NASA in February 1992, Admiral Truly served as vice president and director of the Georgia Tech Research Institute, a nonprofit arm of Georgia Tech, and then as director of the Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory. He retired in 2005.
His awards include the Navy Distinguished Flying Cross, Presidential Citizens Medal and two NASA Distinguished Service Medals.
In addition to her husband, she is survived by her daughter, Lee Rumbles; his sons, Mike and Dan; five grandchildren; and six great-grandchildren.
Admiral Truly admitted that he was afraid of the times he faced danger and technical failure as a Navy pilot and an astronaut.
“Fear is a beautiful, healthy phenomenon,” he once said. “Any pilot who says he wasn’t scared is lying.”
