He Dreamed of Flying to the Stars, And Practiced by Dancing With One

The launch also was the beginning of Mr. Cormier's quest toward low-cost, reusable space vehicles. He worked at NASA, at the Los Angeles Division of North American Aviation and at North American Rockwell before forming his own companies. PanAero Inc. is his last firm.

As a charter member of the Department of Transportation's Commercial Space Transportation Advisory Committee, he made recommendations and offered advice about the U.S. commercial space transportation industry.

He was always coming up with new approaches to space transportation, his family said. "He planned to be a pilot of his own spacecraft," said his wife of 29 years, Anne Greenglass.

During his career, he made improvements on satellites and had solid ideas on building launch systems. Some of his engineering approaches are "flying today," said Doug Postman, who met Mr. Cormier in 1983 while he was working as a consultant.

"He was methodical in his approach to solutions," said Postman, who calls Mr. Cormier his mentor and friend. "He was a person who was ahead of his time because of the concepts and ideas he had."

Mr. Cormier was part of a small community of private entrepreneurs building affordable, reusable space vehicles. Funding was the biggest hurdle for Mr. Cormier's SpaceVan 2011. He tried but failed in 2003 to win the X Prize, a $10 million award offered to the first private team to fly a manned rocket into space.

Sergi Stepanenko, who lives in St. Petersburg, recalled Mr. Cormier's contacting him in the late 1990s about his ventures for "proposed space transportation, proposed space tourism and proposed space-based telecommunications."

They exchanged letters about ways they could work together. Stepanenko said in an e-mail that he was impressed by Mr. Cormier's boyish "admiration and excitement about the universe and a dream to explore it for himself."

Driven, yet always friendly, Mr. Cormier pushed his ideas and conceptual designs as far as he could for as long as he could, to government and private companies.

At 80, the great-grandfather of three renewed his pilot's license. But his dream of flying again, this time out of Earth's orbit, did not materialize. Leonard N. Cormier, a former Fairfax resident, died June 16 at age 82 of neck and head cancer at the Heartland Hospice in Wilmington, Del.