Newsmaker: Charles Bolden

The boss of Nasa was in Abu Dhabi this week as the American space agency steps up its efforts to put a man on Mars by 2030. It’s his latest mission in a career spent battling adversity.

Kagan McLeod for The National

Nasa chief Charles Bolden, a former United States Marine Corps aviator who flew 100 combat missions during the Vietnam War, and as the pilot or commander of four Space ­Shuttle flights, became the first ­African-American in space, is a man on a mission.

On Sunday, that mission brought Bolden to Abu Dhabi, where he addressed an audience of dignitaries, including Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed, Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi and ­Deputy Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces, at a ­Ramadan ­majlis.

“We are going on a journey to Mars,” said Bolden, who has spent the past seven years as the helm of America’s ­National Aeronautics and Space ­Administration.

The “we” in that sentence is the single most important word in Nasa’s new playbook, as Bolden’s next remark made clear: “You’re going to help us turn the impossible into the possible and science fiction into fact.”

Nasa, long on ambition but short on funds, needs all the friends it can get if it’s to achieve its declared goal of putting boots on Mars by 2030.

And as President Obama realised when he appointed the retired major-general to the top job in 2009, if anyone can persuade those friends to come on board, it’s Bolden, whose whole career has been built on achieving the impossible.

While Charles Frank Bolden Jr was growing up in segregated Columbia, South Carolina, the prospect of him becoming an astronaut, let alone the head of Nasa, seemed as remote as the idea of a man standing on the Moon.

It was, as he once noted, "a long way from the segregated south to low Earth orbit". He was just 15 years old when the Gemini space programme got under way in 1961. "I was interested in being an astronaut", ­Bolden told Marines magazine in 1994, "but I didn't think it was ­possible."

But Bolden, the son of Charles Sr, a social studies teacher and athletics coach, and Ethel, a librarian, was raised to recognise and take full advantage of the benefits of education and the value of self-belief.

“While there were distinct disadvantages to attending schools that were not as well-funded or equipped as the white schools, we were blessed with superbly dedicated teachers,” he recalled in 2002.

As a result, he excelled at maths and science, and learnt the most valuable lesson of all: “That I could accomplish almost any goal were I willing to invest the time in study, hard work, and a belief in what others said could not be done.”

Bolden’s first goal after his all-black high school was as improbable at the time as his dreams of space – to attend the prestigious Naval Academy at Annapolis. To do so required a nomination from a state senator, and not one of South ­Carolina’s white representatives would support him.

“It was clear why,” Bolden told National Public Radio earlier this year. “They were just not about to appoint a black to the Naval Academy.”

So Bolden went over their heads. On November 28, 1963, he wrote to President Lyndon B Johnson to plead for help. A few weeks later, “a recruiter came to my house … and said: ‘Hey, I understand you want to go to the Naval Academy.’”

After the Naval Academy, even the sky was no longer the limit for Bolden. Emerging from ­Annapolis in 1968 as president of his class, with a degree in electrical science, Bolden was commissioned into the Marine Corps as a second lieutenant. After two years of flight training, he went to war as a naval aviator, flying more than 100 missions in ­Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia between 1972 and 1973.

He found time to marry, and in 1971, his wife gave birth to a son, Anthony, who followed him into the Marines. Their daughter, Kelly, born in 1976, is now a plastic surgeon in Washington.

After the war, Bolden applied five times before finally being accepted for training at the US Naval Test Pilot School. Graduating in 1979, he worked on a number of new attack aircraft, but his heart remained set on a future far above the clouds.

Finally, in 1980, as one of five Marine Corps nominees for the Shuttle programme, he headed for Houston. He passed a ­gruelling series of interviews and tests with flying colours, and in August 1981, became the first ­African-American astronaut.

His career in space very nearly ended in disaster. Bolden's first trip was to have been in 1986, as the pilot of the shuttle Challenger, but six months before the launch of the 25th mission of the Shuttle programme, Nasa bumped Bolden's crew to a subsequent flight. On ­January 28, 1986, Challenger was destroyed 73 seconds after take-off, killing all seven on board.

Later, Bolden insisted the fateful crew switch had not affected his outlook. “Not at all,” he said in 2011. “You know some people go through life asking: ‘Why me?’ I have no clue why God does what he does with me, and I don’t worry about it.”

He would go on to spend more than 680 hours in space, as pilot of Columbia in 1986, and in 1990, of the Discovery mission that put the Hubble Space ­Telescope in orbit. He flew as commander on Atlantis in 1992 and Discovery in 1994, before leaving Nasa to return to the Marines.

It was during his fourth and last shuttle flight, the first joint US-Russian mission, which included a cosmonaut in its crew of six, that Bolden learnt the value of international cooperation.

At first, as he later recalled, “I said: ‘Forget it. I’m a Marine. I trained all my life to kill those guys. They’d have done the same thing to me, and I don’t want to fly with them.’”

But after he was persuaded to meet cosmonaut Sergei Krikalev, the two men went out to dinner one evening in Washington, “and we talked about families, kids, and things we wanted in life. And by the time the dinner was over, I was sold. Even a ­Marine can change.”

For the past seven years, Bolden has been charged by ­President Obama with steering the course of Nasa. His first, tough task was to pull the plug on the cash-starved Constellation programme, seen by many as a nostalgic and fundamentally unambitious attempt to rekindle Nasa’s glory days by sending astronauts back to the Moon.

Bolden was the definition of the new broom that many observers felt Nasa needed. In 2011, as the last shuttle missions were taking place, he rejected suggestions that the once revolutionary space vehicle was being retired too soon.

"It's time to move on," he told Air & Space, the Smithsonian magazine in July that year, as ­Atlantis was readied for the 135th and final flight of the 34-year programme. "Many of us felt that we could have chosen to do this any time after Challenger."

As chief of Nasa's safety division at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Bolden had been in charge of getting the remaining shuttles back in the air safely after the Challenger accident, which disrupted the shuttle programme for almost three years. Seven more astronauts would lose their lives when sister ship Columbia, which Bolden had flown 17 years earlier, was destroyed during re-entry in 2003.

By the time Bolden took over at Nasa, both he and the Obama administration recognised that only international and commercial partnerships would make the dream of going to Mars a reality – and as he revealed during an interview with Al Jazeera in 2010, the most valuable of those partners would be found in the Muslim world.

Obama, Bolden said, tasked him with three objectives: “He wanted me to reinspire children to get into science and maths, he wanted me to expand our international relationships … and, perhaps foremost, he wanted me to find a way to reach out to the Muslim world”.

His guiding model is the ­International Space Station, which is “as great as it is because we have a conglomerate of about 15 nations who have ­contributed”.

Nasa, said Bolden after signing an agreement with the UAE Space Agency on Sunday, “is leading an ambitious journey to Mars that includes partnerships with the private sector and many international partners”.

Back in 1962, with the US lagging behind the Soviet ­Union in the space race, President ­Kennedy committed his country to putting a man on the Moon by the end of the decade. Nasa was awash with cash – it consumed 4.4 per cent of the US federal budget in 1966 – and could afford to go it alone. These days, it’s lucky if it gets 0.5 per cent of the budget, and getting to Mars is an altogether tougher, far more expensive proposition than landing on the Moon.

Nevertheless, in a speech in ­November, Bolden revealed Nasa aimed to put humans on Mars by 2030. On Sunday, Nasa and the UAE Space Agency formalised cooperation in the exploration of Mars as “the first field of collaboration” with the creation of “a joint steering group to guide discussions about potential future projects that contribute to exploring the Red Planet”.

During his flying visit to Abu Dhabi, Bolden, a man who overcame prejudice to redefine the possible, has dangled the intriguing and inspirational possibility that in the very near future a red, green, white and black flag may fly on the Red Planet.

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