Former NASA astronaut William “Bill” Lenoir, who flew aboard the Space Shuttle Columbia’s first operational mission to deploy a pair of commercial communications satellites, died Aug. 26 in New Mexico from a head injury sustained in a bicycle accident. He was 71.
Lenoir resigned from NASA in 1984 — two years after his first and only shuttle mission — to join the Washington consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton. In 1989 he returned to NASA to serve as associate administrator for space flight. He left NASA in 1992 to rejoin Booz Allen Hamilton as vice president of the applied systems division.
He is survived by his wife Terri and three grown children.
