Share this
Mister Wong
Digg
Del.icio.us
Slashdot
Furl
Yahoo
Technorati
Newsvine
Googlize this
Blinklist
Facebook
Wikio
Hear this text
Print
E-mail
Charles Bolden is ushering in an AstronaissanceIn the normal course of human endeavour, it is quite commonplace to have people reaching extraordinary achievements; or being “first” among a group of competing peers in some activity; or being the first to accomplish something.
But when these achievements are being logged in the uncertain and unknown realm of space travel, “commonplace” falls away and it becomes something else – something more amazing than usual. At least for us ordinary earthlings, that is.
For retired Marine Corps major general Charles Frank Bolden Jr., however, his achievements seem to be no big deal, judging by the matter-of-fact, even humble manner in which he speaks about them.
If you did not know better, you would never guess that he is the first African American to be appointed as administrator (head) of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA); and that coming from the segregated Deep South of America in the early 1960s, he was among the first African Americans to successfully pursue a career as a military pilot and astronaut.
Bolden, who prefers to be addressed informally as “Charlie”, was in Cape Town in October to attend the 62nd International Astronautical Congress with the theme of “African Astronaissance”, and which coincided with World Space Week.
Ushered into a Victoria & Alfred Waterfront hotel suite by United States Embassy staff to meet him, I expect the stereotypical astronaut of super-athletic build, dressed in medal-covered uniform, with a crew-cut haircut and flashing toothpaste-advert smile. Instead, I find myself shaking hands with an almost grandfatherly figure of average, trim build with a genuinely pleasant smile, and dressed in a civilian suit. Yet, a strong trace of the military officer is fixed in his bearing.
“Hello, hello, I am Charlie Bolden,” he says, pumping my hand. “Please do sit down.”
Puzzlement gets the better of me, and my first question is: why hold an astronautical conference in down-to-earth Cape Town, of
all places?
“I am not really sure why Cape Town, but my hope is that the planners brought it here this time because there are a number of African countries that have emerging interests in space studies and space exploration,” he replies. “The South Africans have their own space agency and we work with them to some degree. So I would hope that is why it came here.”
It further allows Bolden to meet with counterparts of other African space programmes and from other space agencies around the world.
The work NASA does with the South African National Space Agency (SANSA) focuses, among other things, on a number of long-standing educational programmes.
“There is always the prospect, too, of training for kids wishing to become astronauts, like Mark Shuttleworth – who did something I haven’t done yet, and that is visit the International Space Station,” says Bolden.
He is pleasantly surprised to hear that a piece of lunar rock from the Apollo 11 first-man-on-the-moon mission of 1969 as well as a pre-1994 South African flag that travelled to the moon and back reside in Parliament in Cape Town. In fact, South Africa played a significant tracking role in US space missions to the moon, Venus and Mars between 1961 and 1975, with its space tracking station at Hartbeeshoek.
Growing up in Columbia, South Carolina in the segregated South at a time when African Americans did not have too many glamorous career prospects, becoming a fighter pilot or an astronaut was not something that entered Bolden’s mind as a child – it was simply too far-fetched: “It just was never going to happen,” he says. (Such as man walking on the moon?)
In seventh grade, he saw a television programme about life at the US Naval Academy and became infatuated by it. “I did not know anything about the Navy or the Naval Academy, except for what I saw on television. But I knew I wanted to go there,” he recalls.
As prospective students need to get a congressional appointment to the academy, Bolden wrote every year for four years to his local congressman, two state senators and to the vice president of the US, letting them know the academy was where he wanted to go.
“It took a lot of extra effort, as I had to overcome the odds because it was still the segregated South – but I managed to get an appointment to the academy from a congressman in Chicago,” he relates.
“When I went there, the only thing I knew was that I was not going to become a pilot or a marine. My first company officer was a marine who really impressed me, and I decided I wanted to be like him – so I became a marine.
“During my infantry training, I found out I really didn’t like crawling around in the mud. I had done well enough at the academy to get an aviation option, so I spoke to my wife and I decided to exercise my option,” adds Bolden.
“The first time I got in an aeroplane, I fell in love with it.”
In 1968, he graduated from the Naval Academy with a Bachelor of Science degree in Electrical Science and was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the Marine Corps. After completing flight training in 1970, he became a naval aviator.
That took Bolden to war, and he soon found himself stationed in Namphong, Thailand from 1972 to 1973, flying combat missions in North and South Vietnam and Cambodia. Of those, he flew more than 100.
During his flight training, one of his instructors, a test pilot, stirred his interest in that dangerous occupation. “I decided that’s what I wanted to do,” says Bolden. “So during my first few years as an aviation pilot, I kept on applying over and over to become a test pilot, and eventually I was sent to test pilot school.
“While I was there, I met a gentleman by the name of Dr Ron(ald) McNair who, like me, was an African American from South Carolina. He had always dreamt of being an astronaut. I had never thought about it. He talked to me and kind of enticed me into applying – and eventually I was accepted for the programme. So that’s how I became an astronaut.”
McNair was killed in 1986 aboard the Challenger space shuttle that disintegrated nine miles above the Atlantic Ocean, 73 seconds after takeoff. On an earlier Challenger mission in 1984, he became only the second African American to fly in space.
As test pilot, Bolden had flown many test project missions; and as a pilot had logged over 6 000 hours of flying time. Those daring test pilot skills he took to the space programme when he became, as a test, the first person to ride the Launch Complex 39 slide wire baskets that enable rapid escape from a space shuttle on the launch pad.
Is becoming an astronaut similar to the way it is portrayed in the 1983 movie The Right Stuff, I want to know from him? He laughs and says, “Not really, but it used to be like that.” These days, the emphasis is far less on the physical attributes of candidate astronauts.
“We now know that you just have to be relatively healthy; and the criteria now are more psychological than anything else because we spend six months at a time in space on board the International Space Station – so it takes a different kind of person than in the days of The Right Stuff. I did not have to go through The Right Stuff kind of stuff!” Bolden jokes.
Space programmes are costly. Is it viable to spend so much money on these, particularly having just come out of a global financial crisis and still facing the European debt crisis?
“One of the most important aspects of the National Space Act, which established NASA in 1958, was to promote commerce and industry and help with the economy – and there is no better way to help with the American economy than to help develop new technologies and new capabilities that we can use to build up our industry,” notes Bolden.
He provides a few examples: “We just recently decided on a heavy-lift launch vehicle. That is going to mean newer, more technically orientated jobs. That is going to put people to work.
“In the space field, again, we have decided that we are going to rely on the industry itself to build and operate space craft going into low-earth orbit, taking both cargo and crew.
“So we at NASA like to think we are helping the nation grow itself out of the doldrums of the last decade or so,” Bolden adds.
“The money that President (Barack) Obama has put forward in his proposals for NASA supports the programmes that we have laid out. And I have always said we are not going to give Congress or the American people any programmes that are not affordable, sustainable and realistic.”
At present, the NASA budget is around US$18 billion per year, split three ways between science, human exploration and education, and technology development.
Bolden says the Shuttle programme was “an incredible 30-year technological era that will not be matched for quite some time”. But it prevented NASA from going beyond low-earth orbit to explore in deep space.
And that is what NASA will be doing in terms of President Obama’s new US space policy announced last year. Among the aims are to develop the deep space exploration system with a heavy-lift launch vehicle and crew module to take astronauts to deep space; and to reach an asteroid by 2025, Mars by about 2030, and then on beyond that, explains Bolden.
“The next huge thing that people will see comes in November when we launch the Mars Science Laboratory, nicknamed ‘Curiosity’. It is a vehicle that is an automobile-sized rover, which we are going to put on the surface of Mars.
“It’s going to take about eight months to get it there, and it will be there for a number of years. It is another robotic precursor that is preparing us to send humans to Mars in the 2030s, we hope,” he says.
Bolden left the space programme in 1994 after spending more than 680 hours in space on four flights, two of which he commanded. His last flight was the first flight in the first phase of the Shuttle-Mir programme, which refers to co-operation between the US and Russia in building and operating the International Space Station. Despite four flights into space, he never visited the International Space Station.
“The only thing up there at that time was the Russian space station Mir, and I did not go to Mir,” he says.
Bolden returned to active duty with the Marine Corps and, among many other postings and assignments, he served as commanding general of I Marine Expeditionary Force Forward in support of Operation Desert Thunder in Kuwait.
Bolden, married to Alexis (Jackie) Walker of Columbia and with whom he has two children (a plastic surgeon and a Marine Corps colonel), was inducted into the US Astronaut Hall of Fame in May 2006. In 2009, President Obama appointed him as the 12th administrator of NASA.
Stef Terblanche
