Charles F. Bolden Jr., Nominated by President Barack Obama to Serve as NASA's First African American Administrator

Positive role models are integral in the development of our youth and I am pleased to see President Barack Obama's nomination of Charles F. Bolden Jr. to serve as NASA's next administrator. Bolden, who is an African American, is a former combat pilot, Marine Corps major general and a veteran space shuttle commander. His nomination comes 19 years after he helped launch the Hubble Space Telescope. Thank God Bolden's nomination will mean the end to Mike Griffin's "reign of incompetence" at NASA. He was nominated by President George W. Bush to oversee the shuttle's 2010 retirement and a planned return to the moon.

Many insiders have hailed President Obama's nomination of Bolden as a good move. NASA will be in good hands. He is widely respected within the agency for his exceptionally sound engineering judgment, superb leadership skills and a no-nonsense approach to sticky technical issues. He knows how to navigate his way around Washington D.C. and has a good relationship with Congress. We all know how hard a feat that can prove to be in so many instances.

Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Fla., who flew with Bolden during a 1986 shuttle flight, has been lobbying Obama for several weeks to put Bolden in charge of NASA at a particularly critical juncture in the agency's history. With all the problems the President is facing, it is quite easy for NASA to get lost in the shuffle, but his choice is remarkable. NASA is facing its own issues. It is struggling to complete the International Space Station during the final eight shuttle missions between now and the end of 2010. The agency is also trying to develop a new rocket system for the Bush administration's Constellation program, which is aimed at resuming moon flights in 2020.

The Constellation architecture, which calls for the development of a new heavy lift unmanned Ares 5 booster, a lunar lander, and a smaller Ares 1 rocket to boost Orion crew capsules into orbit, has come under fire from critics who claim alternative rocket systems can be developed faster at lower cost. This program was grossly mismanaged by Mike Griffin and I hope Mr. Bolden can salvage this project without spending excessive amounts of money.

Bolden's shuttle history

Bolden's first space flight came when he and six crewmates, including Nelson, took off aboard the shuttle Columbia on January 12, 1986. It was the last successful shuttle mission before Challenger's fatal January 28 launch. Bolden took off a second time on April 24, 1990, when he served as pilot of the shuttle Discovery to ferry the Hubble Space Telescope into orbit.It is a given in the astronaut office at the Johnson Space Center in Houston that any flight assignment is a good flight assignment. But the Hubble Space Telescope, one of the most expensive civilian satellites ever built, was in a class by itself, and Bolden clearly relished a chance to play a role in the showcase mission.

"Astronomy captivates everybody," he said in an interview at the time. "A kid in the ghetto, a kid on the farm, everybody at one time or another happens to glance up at the nighttime sky and they see these things we call stars and every once in a while a planet."You'd just have to be a non-human being not to go 'what the heck is that?' It has a fascination for everybody."

Bolden flew in space a third time as commander of the shuttle Atlantis for an atmospheric research mission that took off March 24, 1992. His fourth and final space mission was a historic flight as commander of the shuttle Discovery in 1994, a mission that included cosmonaut Sergei Krikalev, the first Russian to fly on a space shuttle.The Russian space program is now critical to NASA, providing the transportation to and from low-Earth orbit while the U.S. agency develops its shuttle replacement. Source: CNET

I applaud President Obama for his nomination of Charles Bolden Jr. to head NASA and I know that he will continue to prove his mettle. He is a positive role model, not just to African American children, but to all children who aspire to be astronauts or work for NASA, or become scientists in other fields. Whatever the mind can conceive, it can truly achieve.