This obituary is part of a series about people who have died in the coronavirus pandemic.

Richard Passman, an aeronautical engineer whose wide-ranging career took him through the early stages of supersonic flight, spy satellites and intercontinental ballistic missiles, died on April 1 in Silver Spring, Md. He was 94.

The cause was complications of the new coronavirus, his son William said.

Mr. Passman was involved in crucial space-age projects, many of them secret — unlike the work of the civilian space program, which made public figures of those who blasted into space and some of those whose work got them there, Dwayne A. Day, a space historian, said.

“There was a classified space program and there were people equally smart,” Mr. Day said, “and yet we don’t know their names.”

Richard A. Passman was born on June 30, 1925, in Cedarhurst, N.Y., on Long Island, to Matthew and Ethel Passman. (The middle initial didn’t stand for anything, his son William said.) His father co-owned an insurance company, and his mother was a homemaker.