Astronaut Charles Bolden to Lead NASA
President Obama has picked Charles Bolden to head NASA — the photo above is from a shuttle mission in 1986. Bolden’s biography is nothing short of amazing: For starters he flew over 100 missions as a pilot in Vietnam and has been an astronaut on four shuttle missions. Bolden is well liked within NASA which is critical as the agency will try and retire the shuttle fleet while prepping for a moon mission with no real extra budget — to say the least it’s going to be challenging.
While it seems that it has taken forever for Obama to pick a NASA leader in fact in terms of other administrations this pick comes early which I take to be a good sign. Here’s a reaction from Florida Senator Bill Nelson to the announcement which does a nice job of summing up who Charles Bolden is:
Helping out Bolden as NASA Administrator and Deputy Administrator will be Lori Garver. As a former L5 Society member I love this pick because in her past Garver has served as executive director of the pro-space group the National Space Society. Here’s a video of a debate from 2008 at the Mars Society in which Garver represented the Obama campaign: