FIRSTS Conversation with the First African-American NASA Administrator

JR: Welcome to First Conversations. This is our podcast and speaker series that puts a spotlight on barrier breakers, glass ceiling smashers, and innovators who have helped shape modern life. All of our guests are trailblazers who cleared a path for others, and you'll get to hear more about what it took for them to get there. My name is Jessica Rosenworcel. I'm the Chairwoman of the Federal Communications Commission, and today's guest is a trailblazer in his own right with a career that is literally out of this world. I'm talking about Charlie Bolden. Back in 2009, President Obama appointed Bolden to be the 12th Administrator of NASA, and that made him the first African American to head the agency on a permanent basis.

Now, it's hard to imagine a cooler job than serving as the head of NASA but wait until you hear about Charlie Bolden's resume. He was also an astronaut. He flew on four space shuttle missions and logged over 680 hours in space. He piloted two of those missions and served as a commander on two others. He was also a Marine Corps attack pilot and test pilot, flying over 100 combat missions.

Alright, you're not sufficiently impressed. Well, he graduated from the Naval Academy, and while he was at Annapolis, he was both a talented boxer and a member of the Glee Club. We can contain multitudes.

And he was also elected President of the Class of 1968. And for all of this, he was inducted into the U.S. Astronaut Hall of Fame, the National Aviation Hall of Fame, and awarded the Wright Brothers Memorial Trophy. Thank you, Charlie, for joining us today. It's great to have you.

CB: It's good to be here. Thank you.

JR: Alright, I really feel like starting the day off starting with like, is there anything you're not particularly good at?

CB: I'm not good at some of those you mentioned. Singing.

JR: Alright. Me neither. I just went over all your professional highlights. So why don't you give us a sense of your upbringing? Where'd you grow up and what your childhood was like?

CB: I grew up in the segregated South in the Jim Crow era. I grew up in Columbia, South Carolina. My wife and I both we have known each other since we were three. So, our families were friends because both sets of parents were teachers, were educators. They had both grown up and had gone to school together at Booker T. Washington High School, which at the time that they were in school in the 30s was the only black school for students in Columbia. So, they went their separate ways for college, came back, went into teaching. But that's where I grew up. And I tell people all the time, everything I needed to know about leadership and ethics. Where are the attorneys? I know I met one. And you give the annual ethics brief to the chair. That was a battle between me and the and the legal folk at NASA because I said, ‘I know you're doing this because it's a legal requirement. But we're talking about ethics, not law.’ And there is a distinct difference. And I said, ‘Everything I needed to know about ethics, I learned from my mom and dad at the dinner table.’ So, that's my background.

JR: And your mom, she was her own kind of trailblazer. She founded the first elementary school library for black children in Columbia.

CB: She did. That was Waverly Elementary School and her first school. She eventually went, my junior high school, and then she was selected to be the first black librarian to go into formerly all-white schools. So she went to Drear High School, which was a pretty big, I wouldn't call it famous, but it was a very popular high school in Columbia because it was the school where the governor's kids and the legislators' kids attended. So, it was a pretty important school.

JR: A lot of firsts' going on in your family.

CB: I am not a first, believe it or not. So, there may be some little things. Being first is not the most important thing. And if I can get a message across to any of the people in here, or looking in, being first without having a second or third doesn't count.

JR: You bet.

CB: Because it means that either you did it and you didn't do well, or you did it and no one has any intent of taking what you accomplished and recognizing its value. And so, bringing in other people who look like you or who know the same kind of things you do.

JR: Amen. That's all I've got to say about that, especially as the first woman to permanently lead this agency. Alright. You're pulling at my heartstrings. But let's talk a little bit about the Naval Academy. If you're going to go to Annapolis, you've got to get a recommendation from a top government official. So, I'm trying to put two and two together here because at the time, I think South Carolina's congressional delegation had a certain senator named Strom Thurmond. So, I want you to explain how you managed to wrangle that recommendation.

CB: Well, Strom Thurmond was the head of the South Carolina delegation. My two senators were Strom Thurmond and Olin D. Johnston, who is much less known. My congressional representative was Albert Watson. And so, in ninth grade. I decided I want to go to the Naval Academy when I was 12 years old. When I was in seventh grade, I saw a program on television called Men of Annapolis. And without ever having been there, having known nothing about the Navy or the Marine Corps, which I really wasn't considering, I decided that's where I wanted to go to school. I love the way the campus looked. I love the fact that all the beautiful girls came down on the weekends. And even at the age of 12, I knew that there was something really good about that. And so that's where I wanted to go. So, in ninth grade, I started applying to my congressional delegation because they give appointments. And then my out was going to be the Vice President of the United States, who at the time was Lyndon Johnson. And every year they would send me a letter back that said, ‘Hey, it's too early. Contact us when you're a senior.’ Well, going into your senior year, I did it. And that was when Strom Thurmond and the South Carolina delegation made it very clear that they were not only not even thinking about it, but they would not consider appointing a black to a service academy. Olin Johnston came back and offered me an opportunity: Go to the Merchant Marine Academy. But I wasn't interested in it.

I was counting on getting an appointment from Orlando, Lyndon Johnson. And then November 22nd, my senior year, I was on the football team, and we were on our way to Charleston to play for the state-colored championship. And we got word that President Kennedy had been assassinated. And so, it was a really dark day twice over for me because I had lost my President. But I also knew that I had lost any opportunity to go to the Naval Academy because Lyndon Johnson was going to become President, and I wasn't eligible for a presidential appointment. And here's where my mom came in. She saw how dejected I was, and she said, 'Are you going to give up?' I said, 'I don't know what to do.' She said, 'Well, think about it.' And I said, 'I don't know what to do.' She said, 'Just think about it.' And so, I went and got the typewriter out and typed out a short letter to President Johnson saying, 'Hey, this is me, Charles Bolden.' I still want to go to the Naval Academy really bad. I recognize the fact that I'm not eligible for a presidential appointment, but I need help. Never heard from him. But within weeks, a Navy recruiter knocked on my front door, asked for me. And then several months later, President Johnson sent a retired federal judge from right here in D.C., Judge Bennett, around the country looking for qualified young men of color to get appointments to the service academies. And I ended up getting an appointment from Congressman William Dawson in Chicago, Illinois. So, I went to the Naval Academy from Chicago, Illinois, not from Columbia, South Carolina.

JR: That's an incredible story. So, I was also looking into the story of how you became an astronaut. And I found this quote, which you're going to have to explain. You said you were ‘embarrassed into becoming an astronaut.’ I don't imagine that's the usual route.

CB: If you remember, when I talked about the Naval Academy, I said I didn't know anything about the Marine Corps because I really had no intention of going in the Marine Corps. And that was sort of the two things that I was definitely not going to do coming out of high school.

Becoming a Marine was one of them. Probably right at the top, because I thought Marines were a little crazy. And I was not going to fly airplanes because that was inherently dangerous. So, those were the only two things that I was not going to do. I did go to the Naval Academy. I came out because of the person who impressed me the most my first year there, Major John Riley, my first company officer. He was like my dad, was tough, but eminently fair. And when it came time to make up my mind where I wanted to go, I said I want to be like him. I want to be an infantry officer. I want to serve in the Marine Corps. My family was not happy. My dad cried like a baby because the Tet Offensive had just occurred in 1967, the year before. And the life expectancy of a second lieutenant was expressed in months, if not weeks. And nobody wanted me to do that. But I said, this is what I want to do. I want to be like him. I changed my mind after going through my last exercise at the basic school down in Quantico, where I thought I would die. And I decided I really didn't like crawling around in the mud. I had an aviation option. I had done well enough at the academy. So, I went in and exercised my aviation option. And my wife and I headed off to Pensacola to do the second thing I was not going to do.

And I ended up becoming a pretty good pilot, a test pilot. And while I was a test pilot, NASA selected the first group of space shuttle astronauts. And among them was another South Carolinian, Dr. Ron McNair, the late, great Dr. Ron McNair, who was a little bit younger than me. But Ron had gone to North Carolina A&T, an HBCU. Had graduated with honors. Had to be talked into going to MIT. But he did. Where he earned a Ph.D. in laser physics and later became one of the world's foremost laser physicists was selected by NASA to be an astronaut. Flew his first flight and then came back and was in between, you know, getting ready for his second flight and then flying subsequently a second flight where we lost him in Challenger. But Ron came to the Patuxent River where I was a test pilot to visit with some other folks who had gone there and were astronauts in his class. And I knew there were three blacks selected in the first group of space shuttle astronauts. But I didn't know any of them. Ron McNair, Fred Gregory, who was an Air Force pilot, and Guy Bluford, who was also an Air Force pilot but selected to be a mission specialist because he had a Ph.D. in engineering. So, I saw this black guy get out of the back of the sleek-looking NASA supersonic T-38. And I rushed over to him and introduced myself. And took him to visit my home with my wife. And we spent the whole weekend talking together. And before I took him back to get on his airplane to go back to Houston, he asked me if I was going to apply for the space program. I said, ‘Not on your life.’ And he looked at me real strange. He said, ‘Why not?’ I said, ‘They never picked me. After thinking for a moment, he said, ‘You know, that is the dumbest thing I ever heard. How do you know if you don't ask?’ It embarrassed me more than anything because my mom and dad had raised my brother and me to believe that we could do anything we wanted to do. Don't pay any attention to what people say. Don't pay any attention to your environment. You can do anything you want to do if you're willing to study hard, work hard. Never be afraid of failure. You know, don't be afraid that somebody is going to say no. And I was all of those. And Ron just kind of shocked me. And he got in his NASA T-38 and went back to Houston. And I went home. And I told my wife, 'You know, this is probably a dumb thing to do, but I'm going to apply for the space program.' And I put my application in, fully expecting that I would hear nothing. And several months later just around my wife's birthday, as a matter of fact, I got a call from Houston. And I was on my way out to fly a test flight.

And the duty officer said, ‘Hey, you got a phone call.’ And I started to say, tell him I'll call back. And I said, no, let me take that call. And I took it. And it was a gentleman by the name of Mr. George Abbey, who we lost a few weeks ago. He was the head of all selection of astronauts and everything. And during my interview, I had been told, if you're selected, you'll get a call from George Abbey. If you're not selected, you may get a call from George Abbey. But if anybody calls other than George, you're not selected. And so, when he said, 'This is George Abbey,' I went, 'Oh, there's a chance.' And he asked me if I still wanted to be an astronaut.

I said, 'Yes.' And he said, 'Ok, well, you've been selected in the second class.' And so, I got all excited. He could hear it in my voice. He said, 'But don't say anything to anybody yet, because we've got to notify the media and the rest of your class and all that.' So, I was on my way out for a test flight. This is going to be one of these tests where you go out.' And I was flying an A7 for anybody who knows old airplanes. And it was a single-engine airplane. And I'm going to go out and jam the throttle back and forth to see if I can make the engine fail. And because they were having engine problems in that airplane. And I thought about it. I said, 'OK, now. Should I really go out and fly this test hop and maybe have to jump out of this airplane now that I know I've been selected to be an astronaut?’ And I said, 'but Mr. Abbey said, don't tell anybody.' So, I guess I'll go fly the hop.’

JR: Oh, gosh.

CB: So, I went out and flew the test hop. It went well. No engine failures.

JR: Alright. So, then we get you to space. And you've been there four times.

CB: Yes.

JR: But I want you to roll back.

CB: And 680 hours isn't a lot, by the way.

JR: Ok, It just sounds like a lot to be uninitiated.

CB: It used to be a lot. But people live in space today a minimum of about four to six months.

JR: That's true.

CB: So, you take my total time in space, which is about a month, and multiply it by six. And that's the minimum amount of time that the average astronaut today spends in space.

JR: So, let's go back, though, to that first time, and tell me what memories you have of that first trip going into space.

CB: Oh, tons. One of them you were mentioning as we were walking in here. And because it's humorous, I'll share it with you. My crew member, there were three of us who had never flown before on my mission. Franklin Chang-Diaz, Dr. Chang-Diaz, who is the father of a VASIMIR rocket that we could talk about forever, from Costa Rica. And his story is another miraculous story of becoming an astronaut. Bill Nelson, Congressman then Bill Nelson, then Senator Bill Nelson, now NASA administrator.

JR: Now the current head of NASA.

CB: But the NASA administrator had this idea that if we're going to get support from Congress, we should try to fly members of Congress. So, he offered the opportunity for one senator and one representative to fly in space. Jake Garn said, ‘I want to go.’ And Jake was an experienced Navy pilot, had about 17,000 hours of flight time. So, he flew and had a really good time, did very well. And then nobody in the House raised their hand and Bill Nelson said, ‘Hey, my home state, my home area, we're flying out of my own land.’

JR: He's from Florida, so Cape Canaveral and Kennedy Space Center.

CB: Yep. We talked about that a lot in space. So, that was one of those exciting things. But the other part was just the training and the discouragement going through, thinking I was never going to fly because I was never going to learn all this stuff. I found just overwhelming the amount of information that the instructors tried to open up your head and pour in there. About six months from flight, I remember going to my commander, a guy named Hoot Gibson. And I said, ‘Hoot, I'm I don't think I'm going to do that. This is too much.’

JR: His name was Hoot.

CB: Hoot. Robert Hoot Gibson. He was a Navy fighter pilot.

JR: That sounds like just out of central casting.

CB: Yeah.

JR: So, when the Charlie Bolden movies run, he's going to he's going to be in a prominent role.

CB: Yeah, there's going to be no movie. I said, ‘This is just . . . I don't think I can do this.’ And he said, 'Look, he said, everybody goes through this. Just put your head down and keep studying and all that stuff. And it'll all work out.’ And he was absolutely right. It did come to me, but not until I had killed my crew in a simulation, which was another lesson I learned. I wanted to impress them with how much I knew about my systems. And the pilot sat on the right side, had the electrical systems, the main engines, almost everything except the data systems, the computers and the environmental and life support system, the air that we breathe. That was the commander's. And we lifted off in the simulator one day and lost an engine. And all of a sudden, I looked, and I analyzed the problem; I looked at Hoot, and I said, 'Hey, Hoot, we I think we've lost this engine. And I think we've got an electrical failure that caused the loss of the engine. And he said, 'Ok, go ahead and work the procedure.' And I said, 'Ok.' And I determined that I needed to take one of the buses, a bus - if you know what I'm talking about, an electrical system. I need to take that off the line so that it didn't short out everything else and have all the lights go out. I didn't ask anybody else; I just said this is the right one. And there were 9 to 12 systems that I could do. I picked one and took the switch.

JR: Ok.

CB: It went to really quiet in the simulator. This is in the simulator and we're on our way to space. And then I heard this. [SOUND]. And all of a sudden, we're now instead of going to space, we're falling back into the Atlantic Ocean. And after we died, after we finally landed in the ocean and died, Hoot reached over and grabbed my shoulder and he said, 'Charles.' And I knew I was in trouble when he said that was like my mother calling me Charles Frank.’ I said, 'Yes, Hoot.' He said, 'Did I ever tell you Hoot's law?' I said, 'No, you didn't.' He said, 'It goes like this... No matter how bad things are you can always make them worse.’ And so now I am really, really, really embarrassed. But that became a rule for my flight, that flight and for every other flight that I flew.

JR: See, I knew he was going to have a role in the movie.

CB: No, no, no.

JR: He has a law.

CB: But, you know, going to space, it's not like being in an airplane, you know, where something happens in an airplane, there are some procedures you need to do like right now in a spaceship. You're going to space. There are things that you need to react to. But there's nothing you need to do right now, unless you screw up like I did and cause us to fall out of the sky.

JR: Let's actually talk about that a little bit, because if you look back in history, what I saw was about two weeks after your first space flight, NASA and the United States really suffered one of its worst traumas with the Space Shuttle Challenger when it broke apart. And I know that you were in a leadership role at NASA in the safety division at that time. You had just come back from space yourself. I'm just wondering if you could tell us what that was like, because that definitely is not a simulation.

CB: That was not a simulation at all. And it was. It was traumatic for me personally, because Ron McNair was my role model, my idol, my mentor. He took me over my fraternity after I came into the astronaut office. So, he was like a brother, if not a father, almost, although he was younger than I was. And so, we were all traumatized. It took me about a nanosecond to decide that I was not going to leave the program. Everybody kind of pondered, you know, am I going to? Is this really what I want to do? It didn't take me any time to realize if I left, Ron would kill me. He’d be really disappointed.

JR: So, beyond the personal, though, I'm wondering from where you were sitting, how did the Challenger disaster shape or reshape space exploration? Because I feel like it just had this really profound impact on the United States.

CB: It had good impacts and bad impacts. And I was not in the safety division yet. I was just coming off my crew. So, I didn't have an assignment. But Mr. Abbey again came into my life. And he said, ‘Look, I want you to go. I want you to go over to the safety division and take over.’

JR: So, you took over safety at NASA in the aftermath of that.

CB: And I was actually just the safety division at the Johnson Space Center. But for all intents and purposes, for shuttle, for human spaceflight, that was NASA's safety division. And the first thing I discovered was we had a lot of really good industrial safety engineers. Nobody, not one operational safety person, not one single person who understood flying airplanes and flying spaceships and stuff like that. They could run circles around people about ground safety and wearing your seatbelt and all that kind of stuff. But we just didn't have the people. So, they didn't speak up in meetings because they felt that people would say you don't know anything. So, don't say anything. So, the most important people in the room never spoke up in meetings prior to Challenger. That was one thing we found out. The other thing was communication wasn't coming up to the leadership. It was going down. Everybody knew what we wanted. But nobody in leadership was interested in hearing what the people from the bottom, and that came out in the accident investigation where we learned that many people, even the day of launch, say it's really too cold. We've never tested in these conditions. We're having trouble with the O-rings, the things that keep the solid rocket booster all together and keep hot gases from coming out. But that's out of our experience. So, we shouldn’t fly. We decided to launch anyway. And sure enough, we had what's called a blow-by where the real hot gases from the solid rocket boosters, those two big things on the side, if you remember what a shuttle looked like, down near the base of the right-hand solid rocket booster, gases in excess of a thousand degrees started blowing out. And they melted the attached fitting that held the solid rocket booster to the to the external tank, allowing the booster to fall off into the tank. And that's where the explosion came. It was actually the external tank that exploded because the hydrogen and oxygen propellants came together explosively and caused the shuttle, the cockpit, the place that was pressurized with the crew to literally break away from the rest of the shuttle. And, the film actually showed the cockpit continuing, the crew module continuing to go up ballistically until it came back down and then landed in the ocean.

We knew all that before the day before the sunset on the day that we lost Challenger. We knew what had caused the accident. We didn't know the underlying causes. And that was my job over at safety, was trying to find out what are all these other things like lack of communications, failure to communicate, not paying attention to lessons learned and other kinds of things. This was similar to what had happened in Apollo I when we lost the Apollo I crew on the pad fire, the very first time before we even went to the moon.

JR: So, after all of this, you go back into space three more times.

CB: That's my job.

JR: Three more times.

CB: And it's fun.

JR: And so, you've got to tell me then do you have any favorite memory from any one of those remaining three missions?

CB: All three. I get asked a lot about what's your most interesting experience. The thing that I cherish the most is the preparation and the post-flight activity around my last flight, and it's because I knew several things. I knew it was my last mission. My family had asked me, 'What are you going to do when you grow up?' And I said, 'I don't know.' And they said, ‘We're going to tell you what you're not going to do when you grow up, and you're not going back to space.'

JR: So, you knew it was your last mission?

CB: So, I knew it was my last mission, which I'm not sure many of us have that luxury or that burden to bear. So, I knew every evolution I did in training was going to be the last time I'd ever do that in my life. And I'm an emotional person. I'll cry right here. I literally cried after every training session. You know, I'd go off somewhere and I'd sit there with myself saying, 'I'm not going to do this again.' And I did this for the whole two years of preparing to fly. That was something that I always remember. The other thing was we brought two Russian cosmonauts to the United States to train and fly with us. And so, the interesting thing was, I was here in D.C. at NASA headquarters when I was told I was going back to Houston to command this mission. I wanted to fly I wanted to fly the space telescope, the first servicing mission to Hubble since I had left it in space not exactly working right. And they said, ‘No, we've already assigned that crew. We've got something even more exciting for you. I said, ‘What's that? They said, ‘Well, we have two Russian cosmonauts. He said, ‘They're already here. They're going to be over at some friends of yours tonight for dinner. Why don't you just go by, meet them, have dinner, and then come back in and tell us in the morning what you think.’ And I did. I went to dinner. I was introduced.

Vladimir Titov was a fluent English speaker, young engineer, aerobatics pilot. Was not a military person, so he was different from most cosmonauts. Ended up flying with him, and he was absolutely superb. He taught me a lot, taught all of us a lot. Vladimir Titov was a MiG-21 fighter pilot, and he was a guy who trained all his life to kill me. But he learned, you know, we both learned together. And he spoke no English. So, Sergei acted both as an interpreter and everything for him. But we ended up flying with Sergei. But the experience of going through training with them, we brought their families here. We brought about 100 or so people, support personnel, medical training, flight control, you name it. Because this was an important mission to determine whether or not we could even work with the Russians in the future. We had these visions of putting an American cosmonaut or two, ended up being six, on the Russian space station Mir for six-month missions.

JR: So, this was before that.

CB: It was the test. Yeah. This was called Shuttle Mir. This was the first flight in the Shuttle Mir program. So, we were to determine whether we could work together. And it turned out we did superbly well. We all fell in love with each other. We have followed each other, you know, even now. Sergei, by the way, is the head of the human spaceflight division of Roscosmos, the Russian space agency. Frequently when we have an issue with any spacecraft or anything about the Russian space agency, we'll go right to Sergei because we trust him, and we know he's going to give us a straight answer. And so diplomatically, we can get along with Russia space-wise.

JR: But space diplomacy is a different thing.

CB: You know this. Or you are learning this.

JR: And, you know, I was going to switch and do some of the interviews. I've got a question that I'll ask you if you give me an opportunity.

CB: You get to do that later.

JR: So, President Obama reaches out to you and says, would you like to be NASA’s administrator?

CB: It didn't happen that way.

JR: Alright.

CB: And I don't know how it happened for you, but you were already in this world. I wasn't. I had retired from the Marine Corps in 2003. The last nine years were among the best years of my life because every single day I got up and went with young Marines and their families. And they are among the best people in the world who ask no quarter. And they ‘just tell me what you want me to do, and I'll go train for it, and we'll go do it.’ And they were absolutely incredible. So, leaving them was difficult for me. We went back to Houston and spent six years. And I got a call to come up to Washington and talk to John Holdren, who was President Obama's Science Advisor and Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy. You probably talked to him a lot as a staffer. But I spent the day with Dr. Holdren. We agreed on some things, disagreed on others. One of the ones we disagreed on was the National Space Council. I vehemently opposed it. They loved it. And I gave them my reasons why I hated it.

JR: We still have it.

CB: We still have it. But we don't still have it. We did not have it in the Obama administration.

JR: It started during the last administration, but it continues now.

CB: It was there for the Bush administration and then started after Obama.

JR: In fact, space has become really a profile issue for the Vice President.

CB: Exactly. So, I talked to Dr. Holdren, went home. A few weeks later, I got a call saying, ‘Hey, can you come back to Washington? ‘And I had gone through this drill with folks from White House personnel. And I said, ‘For what?’ And they said, ‘We can't tell you.’ I said, ‘I can't come because I'm not paying money to come to Washington and spend a day or two and I don't know where I'm coming from.’

JR: They're not used to people saying that you know?

CB: No, they're not. And so, they said, ‘Well, the President would like to talk to you.’ Ok, that's good. Nothing about NASA administrators, just the President would like to talk to you. And I came and wasn't able to meet with him on a scheduled appointment because he had an appointment that went way into the night. Nothing's changed. And the next morning, I came in and had about a 25-minute meeting with the president. He did most of the talking and told me about his vision for NASA and how he had been inspired as a young kid growing up in Hawaii when his grandfather would put him on his shoulder and take him down to the pier to watch the Apollo astronauts come in. He wanted American children to be able to see. He really wanted American children to see and experience the same thing that he had done. How he really wanted to advance technology and expand the number of what we call non-traditional partners in the agency. Never mentioned NASA administrator or anything. Thanked me for coming and told me to go home. And I did. And a couple of weeks later, I got another call from White House personnel saying, ‘Hey, can you come back to DC?’ I said, ‘Ok. We've been through this before.’ I said, ‘What is it for this time? They said, ‘Well, the President has decided he wants to nominate you to be the NASA administrator. I said, ‘I can't even agree with that question right now because I've got to talk to my family,’ And so we took a night and mainly talked to my wife, and she said, 'What the heck? I told you not to go anyway to talk to him, and you didn't do what I said, and so now you're caught,’ and so she said, 'Go ahead,' and I came back up, and went through my preparation for confirmation hearings, and everything.

JR: I remembered,

CB: We talked about that.

JR: And the rest is history.

CB: So, I was not a member of the campaign, I was not a political person, I didn't know anything about Washington D.C., which was problematic for me, my first two years, I tell people I sucked I'm not going sugarcoat it, I absolutely sucked as the NASA administrator the first two years because you know my organizational skills, although I'd been a very successful Marine. The organizational skills required to bring . . .

JR: A political agency organization in Washington

CB: Are a little bit different there's still people and people issues but you can't just tell somebody to do something up here and they do it. I mean, I know you all do when the when the Chairwoman says do something you all you all go off and say yes ma'am. Nobody did that okay.

JR: So, one other thing I learned when I was doing some research is that yours was the first human voice to ever be broadcast on the surface of Mars, I just thought that was really cool.

CB: That was because President Obama would not take my recommendation.

JR: Okay, well there's more to this story.

CB: No, It was simple: I thought the first human voice from Mars should be the President of the United States and it wasn't the President. The President doesn't make decisions like that as you know, but someone in the White House Communications Office, evidently decided that.

JR: Like not cool enough. What did they think?

CB: Or that was too trivial. They had actually been at war with me about Mars because we were trying to get the Affordable Care Act passed, and you will remember that as a staffer.

JR: Yeah.

CB: I was talking about Mars with Aviation Week in Space Technology and that was a no-no because nothing was to be discussed by anyone in the administration except the Affordable Care Act and so I had spoken out of turn, and I was sent to the to the woodshed.

JR: Not a lot of nexuses between the Affordable Care Act and activity on Mars

CB: It was something different from the Affordable Care Act.

JR: Yeah. I know you also led the development of the Space Launch System which is this big launch vehicle that's part of NASA's backbone now for space exploration. Talk little bit about that because that's really important, going forward.

CB: That was very controversial

JR: Yeah.

CB: Very controversial for a number of reasons. One because we decided we were going with commercial space flight and we were going to terminate the shuttle, you know.

JR: That was like a revolutionary system.

CB: That was not our decision. That decision was made by President Bush years earlier and endorsed by Congress and NASA was told to do it and they didn't do it. So, now after the Columbia accident in 2003, the Columbia accident investigation board made it very clear that the President should give you all till 2010 to finish construction of the International Space Station and then shuttle should be retired; their rationale was totally wrong. It was because of safety, and shuttle was not an unsafe vehicle, but it was time to retire.

JR: But it was this embrace of commercial activity in space.

CB: It wasn't really embraced by very many people; it was embraced by a minority of people who were I call them ideologues, but they had the President's ear.

JR: Yeah

CB: And so, it was the absolute . . .

JR: Do you think it was the right thing to do, looking back?

CB: Looking back on it, do I think people understand commercial space? Not on your life and that's what makes your job so hard, because we're not moving, you're not moving. This is not meant as criticism of any government agency. Government functions this way. We are very deliberate and methodical, and we have laws and other kinds of things, regulations that we have to follow because it's been proven through time that they keep people out of trouble, they save lives, and they do other things. Industry is not that way, particularly entrepreneurial, and I hate the term but new space industry.

JR: Right.

CB: They're in a rush, they want to go now. We’ll get there.

JR: You can ask anyone in our Space Bureau

CB: I know. I'm looking over here, I'm smiling at the Space Bureau.

JR: And about the advocacy before this agency.

CB: Be patient; be open to new ideas because that was the secret of the transition from shuttle to commercial space where we are today. That was the secret to getting SLS. SLS was something we really needed, and we went through hundreds of different models of how do you get back to the moon and how do you get to space. Everyone just said it just was too complicated trying to go with the new guys that hadn't even flown yet that meant that we were probably never going to get back to the moon.

JR: Right.
CB: And so, we decided, let's take the best of both worlds. Let's take what we have from Shuttle and put it into a super heavy lift vehicle, and that's how we got to the Space Launch System which a lot of critics used to love to call the SLS, the Senate Launch System because their accusation was that it had been stuffed down President Obama's throat. And that was . . . nothing could be farther from the truth. We briefed Dr. Holdren and the President on why SLS was the best way to go for us, and I still believe it's the best way to go. I'll get in trouble for this, but it's not the way of the future, right long-term, because people are really learning how to do reusable spacecraft.

JR: Absolutely.

CB: And we're going to get to a reusable heavy-lift launch vehicle. I'm not a big fan of Starship, but Starship is blazing the trail, and they have the luxury of being able to try and fail. NASA would never be allowed to do that. If I had as many failures as we've had on Starship, I would no longer be the NASA Administrator, and anyone associated with the NASA administration approval of those particular flights would no longer be in their position.

JR: So, let's talk a little bit about that because we are at this agency, try to accommodate . . .

CB: Yeah.

JR: This commercial growth in space, it's very exciting. we're doing a lot of work now to try to coordinate with NASA and our joint friend Phil Nelson, more than ever before, but what advice do you have for our Space Bureau here as we navigate this this new era?

CB: I mean, it's like I said, be patient, stick to your guns, but be open to new because SLS, I think was the right system. Was it the only system? No, not on your life. Is the way we do it now the only way to do it? No, there are a lot of different ways to do it. It's sort of like telling your kids that you want them to wear this to school or you want them to do it this way and you're right as a parent but you're not right in that's not the way the teachers are teaching them.

I went through this with my daughter about math. She wanted me to help her with her homework one day. She was really good, and I said, ‘But Kelly I don't see any work, you know, I know you did it with your calculator, but you've got to understand, show me a formula, you know, that the calculator used to get this answer show me your work.’ ‘Well, my teachers don't have to do that.’ I said, ‘Well your teacher's stupid.’ I shouldn't have said that, especially being, as you know, the son of two teachers, I said, ‘Tell your teacher your dad says you've got to show your work.' And so, she fired me as her tutor and I never tried to teach her again. But she was absolutely right; she didn't need to do that. But I knew that one of these days down the road it would really be nice if she knew what the basic formula was in the case she decided to go off and do something altogether new that wasn't in the computer just yet. You ever see the movie Hidden Figures?

JR: Oh my gosh, I love that!

CB: You know Katherine Johnson? Katherine Johnson went up to the library and pulled a book off the shelf that had the Euler equations in them, I learned the Euler equations decades ago, and then my instructor even told me, 'Don't worry about this, you don't need to, you don't need to memorize this.’

JR: Computers are going figure this out.

CB: Exactly. Katherine Johnson was the only one who remembered this thing called the Euler equations, and that's what she went and got the book out, refreshed her memory, and then went in and taught us men, us white men back then. You know, if you really want to go successfully and do this stuff; this is a way to show your work.

JR: Alright, we're going require that of everyone who comes before us.

CB: Yeah, show your work!

JR: Alright, you brought up a movie, so I'm going do this. What's your favorite movie or TV show about NASA, space?

CB: The Martian.

JR: Yeah! I mean, everyone must have one.

CB: I love The Martian because it's so accurate and it's so true. Every single thing in the Martian we hadn't done yet, but every single thing in the Martian was either in development at NASA or a contractor. You know, we now have flown something called Moxie on the surface of Mars that takes carbon dioxide out of the Martian atmosphere which is dominant there and we make hydrogen and oxygen, so we can make water, that's all that Mark Watney did, everything that he did, fuel you know methane, he used methane, that's how he loaded up his little rocket to be able to get off the planet, taking methane out of the Martian atmosphere, Martian soil, and we're going to do that. All that stuff is based on fact, that's why.

JR: So, we're going have to go check that movie out, you just said it's accurate.

CB: And the author of the book made the movie very accurate because he insisted, he spent a lot of time with NASA, just like who is it, Opie, who was Opie, big producer now.

JR: Ron Howard.

CB: Ron Howard spent two years down at the Johnson Space Center, researching Apollo 13, and he looked at every single foot of documentary of NASA film.

JR: Right.

CB: From that mission because he wanted . . .

JR: The right stuff.

CB: No, this was Apollo 13, the movie, okay, and it is so accurate about this mission where the side of the service module blew out and we didn't think we were going to get the crew back and the term 'failure is not an option' came into being.

JR: I'm going to have to refresh my queue on movies to watch on space.

CB: I mean even if they're not true, they're still good.

JR: I know; they are a big business.

CB: Intergalactic; Gravity.

JR: Contact.

CB: Contact is awesome.

JR: That would my answer for different reasons.

CB: A different reason. The reason I love Contact is for the same reason that I love another one that was called The Arrival. It's because, remember I told you, be patient. In Contact and Arrival, we have two people who are stars in it who are very patient people who have not accepted the fact that we're all there is and that there may, there may be other life in our universe and so be patient and don't shoot them when you meet them, you know, at least ask . . .

JR: Life lessons.

CB: Ask one or two questions, and if you don't understand the language, don't shoot them, but try to work hard to determine a common thing so you can communicate with each other. Don't shoot the other people in our partner communications commissions because they don't agree with us, you know, don't give up on them, but keep working with them. Does that help?

JR: Yeah! Alright. I also noticed that Senator John Glenn - he was about your age when he went to space.

CB: He was exactly my age, 77.

JR: So, you got any ideas?

CB: Senator Glenn has a lot of experience with communications; he's a great one and an idol for me, and a mentor when I came to NASA. He stood by me when I sucked. And he would call frequently and say, 'How's your day going?' You know, I'd say, 'Senator, it sucks.' I'm not getting the hang of this stuff.’ And he would say, 'Be patient and learn.' And, you know, 'You can't always get what you want.' And ‘When you come over here to the Hill, be patient.

JR: Because you can't always get what you want.

CB: You've got to be willing to go halfway because they may not understand a thing you're saying, but there is a reason for them wanting to do things the way they do it. And as long as you can get your mission done and, you know, go halfway with them, go do it.

JR: Yeah, you can make progress.

CB: And that's the way we did it.

JR: Alright. So, because we call this First Conversations, we have some closer, quick questions. And I wanted to ask this one a little bit differently. We always ask everyone: What's the first thing you do in the morning? But I want to say, what's the first thing you did in the morning when you were in space?

JR: Brush my teeth.

JR: It's legit.

CB: Oh, yeah. I'm a freak. I'm almost 78 years old, and I'm wearing Invisalign.

JR: Alright.

CB: Because it's going to help my posture or something.

JR: Is that true?

CB: Well, I mean, they're moving teeth forward and moving teeth backwards so I can chew better and all that.

JR: Okay.

CB: That's what they tell me. The dentist will tell you anything, though.

JR: I know. Alright. What was your first concert?

CB: Oh, easy. James Brown and his band of renown at the Columbia Township Auditorium. Do not remember seeing Reverend Al, although he was 12, 14, 15 at the time and was one of the little stagehands and little dancers and stuff like that. For Mark, you know, when Maceo on the trombone and James.

JR: Okay. But that in the movie's written, I think that should be part of it.

CB: Oh, it rocked the Township Auditorium. And the thing was, we could go and sit anywhere we wanted to sit because those were considered black concerts. So, the white kids had to go sit in the balcony because, you know, their moms and dads didn't want to be there, but they really wanted to go. But they wouldn't let them down on the floor. So, they sat in the balcony, whereas for everything else, we had to sit in the balcony. So, it was great.

JR: Okay. What's one bit of advice you'd give to someone on the first day of their first job?

CB: Listen. Don't say a word. Just listen. First second. First week.

JR: So, we celebrate in this podcast and speaker series those who paved the way for others. So, you've been really generous with mentioning all the people who've helped you along the way. But is there anyone else you'd like to talk about? A mentor who influenced you? I think it's always important for firsts to you know call out those individuals.

CB: I go back. My third-grade teacher, Mrs. Walker, was an incredible, incredibly influential on my life. Not for a reason you might think. And it's because she told me she said, ‘You're naive, you're idealistic and you're going to get hurt. You're just too nice. And in my head, you know, I was eight years old. I said, ‘And you're screwed up. And I'm not going to listen to anything you say.’ I always tell people: always keep a book, and on one page have good lessons and on the other page have bad lessons, then review your book periodically because you'll learn frequently as much or more from the bad lessons - things you don't want to do as a leader, or as a follower, or as a parent, or anything. My good lesson book from being a parent, I don't have many, many good pages. I look at my son and my daughter, their pages. Let me tell you, that's textbook watching them with their kids.
I wish I could do it all over again.

JR: So, I know how many grandchildren you said five.

CB: We have three granddaughters who are grown. And then two baby grandsons. My daughter has the boys. My son has the girl.

JR: I'm sure they're all proud. So, before we go, I'm not sure if you're a social media sort, but if so, where can folks follow the work that you're doing these days?

CB: I don't do much work. I try not to. Let me retire. I still want to go to space. I don't have any plans or anything, but, you know, I'm on LinkedIn. I respond or, I post on. What do we call it? X?

JR: Oh, yeah, I think we call it X.

CB: Yeah, so you won't see me initiate anything on any of those, but I respond to people.

JR: Good to know.

CB: But I'm not a big social media person because I'm not savvy enough to know how to do all that.

JR: I think you got some other skills. I just want to thank you, Charlie Bolden, for your service to the United States for being a first and for really your extraordinary leadership at NASA for more, for nearly a decade, which is incredible. So, thank you so much for joining us here at the FCC.

CB: Thanks for the invitation. Thank you very much. This is great.

[Applause]

One thing I'll tell all of you because she won't tell you. The secret to anything like this is the moderator. You can have the best person in the world. If you don't have a good moderator, you know, who's done their homework and, at least seems like they're enjoying it, it doesn't go well.

[Laughter]

CB: This was awesome because of the moderator. So, thank you. Thank you.