William R. Lucas, Official Blamed in Challenger Tragedy, Dies at 102

William R. Lucas, who oversaw development of rockets for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and shouldered much of the institutional blame for the catastrophic explosion that killed all seven astronauts aboard the Challenger space shuttle in 1986, died on Feb. 10 at his home in Huntsville, Ala. He was 102.

His family confirmed the death.

Dr. Lucas was described as a strong-willed, even autocratic director of the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, which supervised the design and building of the booster rocket whose failure caused the fatal breakup of the Challenger in Florida just 73 seconds after liftoff.

The sickening explosion, on a clear and cold January morning, was witnessed by children in classrooms across the country because the crew included Christa McAuliffe, a New Hampshire schoolteacher who was to be the first American civilian in space.

Investigators determined that the accident was caused by the failure of a rubber seal, known as an O-ring, on one of two booster rockets, which were attached to the shuttle like a jetpack to propel it skyward.

The night before the launch, Dr. Lucas was told that engineers were insisting that the mission be delayed because of cold weather, which they feared would cause the O-rings to fail and leak combustible gasses.

He did not pass the warning on to higher-ups, he testified before a presidential fact-finding commission, because he thought the issue was resolved and because he was not in the chain of command making the launch decision.

Asked by the commission chairman, William P. Rogers, if he had informed senior NASA officials about the engineers’ objections, Dr. Lucas said: “No, sir. That is not the reporting channel.”

The commission’s report was harshly critical that doubts about the O-rings never reached top NASA decision makers, and it faulted Dr. Lucas, along with others, for stifling the warnings of engineers working for the contractor that built the rocket. The report equally faulted the yearslong development of the booster rocket under Dr. Lucas’s leadership.

The commission, which was led Mr. Rogers, a former secretary of state, and the astronaut Neil Armstrong, called for “changes of personnel, organization, indoctrination, or all three” at the Marshall Space Flight Center. The center’s leadership, the commission concluded, had tried to bottle up serious problems and keep NASA officials from learning of them.

Days before the report’s release in June 1986, Dr. Lucas announced his retirement, ending a 34-year career that traced to the early days of American rocketry in the 1950s, when he had worked in Huntsville under Wernher von Braun.

After becoming director of Marshall in 1974, he was known for running a tight ship. He banned employees from jogging on lunch breaks under threat that the time would be docked from their vacation, according to the book “Challenger: A Major Malfunction” (1987), by Malcolm McConnell.

“Lucas’s intolerance of criticism and determination that his center never be blamed for anything goes a long way toward explaining why midlevel Marshall officials never spoke up about the defective rocket joints that ultimately caused the disaster,” Michael Isikoff wrote in 1987 in a review for The Washington Post of Mr. McConnell’s book and another on the disaster.

After the explosion, it emerged that senior managers at Marshall, including Dr. Lucas, had known of the potentially catastrophic issues with the solid-fuel booster rockets as early as 1977. Joints between the cylindrical sections of the rockets had a design flaw that, in the event of an O-ring failure, could result in the loss of the shuttle and its crew. But Marshall’s leaders, according to the Rogers Commission, failed to correct the flaw.

On Jan. 27, the night before the Challenger launch, engineers at Morton Thiokol, the rockets’ manufacturer, pleaded against proceeding if the temperature fell below 53 degrees; they feared that the rubber O-rings would not flex in cold weather as they were meant to do. Temperatures were predicted to fall into the 30s the next morning.

The engineers were overruled by Thiokol managers and an official at Marshall, Lawrence B. Mulloy, the head of the solid-fuel booster rocket program, who vehemently opposed delaying the launch. The commission concluded that it was pressure from Marshall officials that caused Thiokol to overrule its engineers.

Both Mr. Mulloy and Dr. Lucas, speaking at a news conference in Huntsville in February 1986, before the commission had finished its work, defended the recommendation to proceed with a launch. “I think it was a sound decision to launch,” Dr. Lucas said defiantly. His hardheadedness helped convince officials in Washington that he must step down.

Under Dr. Lucas, there was “pervasive arrogance and smugness” at Marshall, the New York Democrat James. H. Scheuer, a member of the House committee that supervised NASA, said at the time.

William Ray Lucas was born on March 1, 1922, in Newbern, Tenn., to William and Donna (Ray) Lucas. He was the valedictorian of his class at Newbern High School in 1939 and earned a B.S. from Memphis State College (now the University of Memphis) in 1943. He served in the Navy during World War II and went on to earn a Ph.D. in chemistry and metallurgy from Vanderbilt University in 1952.

He is survived by a daughter, Donna Lucas Watts; a son, Michael Lee Lucas; six grandchildren; and 13 great-grandchildren. His wife, Polly Jean (Torti) Lucas, died in 2017 after 69 years of marriage.

Dr. Lucas joined von Braun’s storied team of engineers at the U.S. Army’s Redstone Arsenal, which became the Marshall Space Flight Center in 1960, shortly after the creation of NASA. He helped lead the development of the Saturn moon rockets and the lunar rovers; once NASA entered the era of the reusable space shuttle, he oversaw development of its rockets and its massive fuel tank.

In an oral history about his career that Dr. Lucas recorded for NASA in 2010, the Challenger disaster was barely mentioned, and he did not address the deep problems raised by the presidential commission.

Roger M. Boisjoly, one of the Morton Thiokol engineers who tried desperately to delay the Challenger launch because of the weather, who was later hailed for his actions, said in an interview on YouTube before he died in 2012 that Dr. Lucas was responsible for a culture in which Marshall would never be seen to slow down a NASA mission.

“He had his people under him scared to death because he could crush their career in a heartbeat,” Mr. Boisjoly said. “And he had basically stated that the Marshall Space Flight Center would never, ever be responsible for delaying a launch.”