General Charles Bolden took his post as Administrator of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration on July 17, 2009 after nomination by President Obama and confirmation by the US Senate. During his time at NASA, Bolden’s positions included Special Assistant to the Director of the Johnson Space Center, Chief of the Safety Division at Johnson, lead astronaut for vehicle test and checkout at the Kennedy Space Center, and Assistant Deputy Administrator. Before working at NASA, Bolden earned his bachelor’s degree in electrical science from the US Naval Academy and served as a naval aviator and a second lieutenant in the Marine Corps. He then earned a Master of Science degree in systems management from USC in 1977, and was selected as an astronaut candidate in 1980. Between 1986 and 1994, he commanded two space shuttle missions and traveled to orbit four times. After his last mission, he returned to the Marine Corps as the Deputy Commandment of Midshipmen at the US Naval Academy. In 2006, General Charles Bolden was inducted into the US Astronaut Hall of Fame.
The Politic: You and President Obama have both promised to send humans to Mars by the 2030s. What are the benefits of exploring Mars, and how realistic of a goal is it for Americans to go there within the next few decades?
The primary challenge, believe it or not, is actually fiscal, and a matter of national will. The decision will be for the Congress and the next administration and the one after that to follow through on President Obama’s commitment to put humans there. There are also some technical and physiological challenges, the primary ones being speed, and the necessity for speed comes from the physiological challenge of trying to keep the crew from being exposed to excessive radiation.
Presently, it’s an eight-month trip and that’s just too long for humans to be exposed to the radiation that we so far think exists between here and Mars. So, if we could get better propulsion systems, what we refer to as game-changing propulsion, solar or nuclear electric or some other type of power system like ion engines, then it will be possible. All of these are things that are either in experimental production or in development right now but nobody has currently available, so those are the big challenges.
The Politic: While we are on the topic of deep space exploration, NASA has developed plans to “lasso” an asteroid and pull it closer to Earth so that humans can examine it. What can we learn from exploring asteroids?
People loosely use the term “lasso an asteroid” and there are a number of concepts that we are looking to right now. One of the concepts that was initially studied at the jet propulsion lab in Pasadena, California was to use a very large capture device – a basket if you will – to fly around a roughly seven-meter asteroid across, capture the asteroid in a basket, and then use the momentum of the asteroid to carry us closer and closer to the earth-moon system. With us thrusting with solar electric propulsion for about a year and half, we could cause the asteroid to vary its path ever so slightly till we got it close enough to the moon that the moon would grab it like it does a spacecraft and pull it into orbit. Conceptually, that’s what we are thinking about.
There are other types of things we can do. For example, we have had proposals to install solar electric engines or some other type of rocket engine into the surface of the asteroid and use that to thrust, to vary the direction of the asteroid. Another novel concept would be to pick a very large asteroid and fly a robot to it, extract a number of small boulders from the asteroid and take them and put them into lunar orbit.
Going back to what’s the value, asteroids represent to scientists a key to the history of our solar system. Asteroids have been flying around the sun now for millennia, since the beginning of this solar system, and many of them contain the same types of materials that are in the planets of our solar system. So many scientists think if we can capture an asteroid we will learn a lot about the solar system, from its beginning to present state.
Another thing we can learn to do is to operate in an area of space that we have not operated in before. We would put it into lunar orbit that is somewhere close to zero gravity – some people refer to them as Lagrange points, but we just call them stable orbit points – where the effect of the moon’s gravity and sun’s gravity and earth’s gravity are all negated because it’s the right distance from three bodies. We don’t know how to operate there with human spacecraft. The value there is that it helps us as we try to ultimately put humans on Mars.
The other things we will learn or develop are refining our life-support systems for humans traveling to an asteroid, as right now the life-support systems that we have – for example on the International Space Station – while good, are not as resilient and robust as we need them to be for what could be a three year journey to and from Mars. In order to develop more robust life-support systems for an asteroid mission, we are moving down the list of requirements for sending human to Mars. By designing the solar electric propulsion system that we intend to use to move the asteroid, we again are finding a new propulsion method of sending large cargo and the like to Mars. So most of what we are doing and hoping to do with the asteroid is actually in preparation for sending humans to Mars.
The Politic: Shifting more toward international competition in space, how do you think the relative strengths of the U.S., Russian, and Chinese space programs will change in the next 5-10 years?
I can’t make a projection on what the U.S. Congress is going to decide to do about budgets, president’s initiatives, and the like. Let me set the stage: if the United States, meaning Congress and the executive, continues to support a relatively robust space program, one that intends to stay ahead of the rest of the world, the US will continue to lead all other nations. There are none that are close to us now in terms of technological capability. Everybody likes to talk about the fact that we can’t launch a human from our own spacecraft right now. Well, that’s very true, but that’s a minor challenge compared to the other things that we do that other countries can’t, and we will be able to launch humans on American spacecraft in the next four to five years, provided Congress continues to support the President’s program and allows us to spend the money to help develop a commercial capability to get humans into orbit.
People didn’t think we could have American industry take cargo tow, as little as four years ago. Now we have two American companies, SpaceX and Orbital Sciences, that will routinely begin to carry American cargo to the ISS for us. We pay for this service. We don’t own or operate the spacecraft anymore like we did the shuttle, so we are free from that burden and are thus able to spend more of our time and effort developing deep-space exploration systems.
The Politic: Speaking of private space companies, can NASA effectively work together with these organizations or is there a lot of competition?
There is no competition between NASA and the private space companies. I tell people all the time there’s not even national competition among which NASA is involved. Right now, the real competition is between private space companies; SpaceX, Boeing, Sierra Nevada, are three very strong competitors right now to see who is going to get NASA’s contract to take humans to the ISS. It is industry versus industry right now to see who is going to be the winner in carrying humans to places like the ISS and other destinations we will develop in the coming years.
Can I go back to your first question about Mars? Because I didn’t completely answer that and it’s really important I answer the whole thing. There is always a “why” question, and at NASA we always want to explain to people why we are doing something, particularly to the American taxpayer. The dream of humans has always been to travel into deep space. Even before we had airplanes, people were writing science fiction books about going to Mars and deep space and actually even leaving our solar system, which NASA, through work with American industry, has now done. We have actually sent a spacecraft that has left the Solar system, in the form of Voyager, and is now in interplanetary space.
That was a dream as recent of two years ago, and has now been accomplished as of last August. It has always been a dream, a sort of fantasy, of humans to live on other planets. The most likely planet for human existence is Mars right now. When the President challenged us back in 2010, he said by the 2030s NASA will send humans to orbit Mars with the intent of landing there. Implicit in that statement is that humans will land on the planet Mars with the purpose of living there over long periods of time. It is sort of like humans deciding to go across the Mississippi River. They didn’t decide they wanted to do it just to see what was over there and come back to the East Coast. They settled there. Then they crossed the Rockies and settled there. Then they got to the West Coast and they still weren’t happy. That’s just human nature. So I think humanity wants to live somewhere else, in addition to Earth. That’s not to replace Earth, but in addition to Earth. And so the ultimate goal of NASA’s endeavors in trying to get humans to Mars is so that humanity can live there one day.
The Politic: In the face of sequestration cuts and furloughs during the shutdown, what would you say to critics that argue federal money should go more toward solving current domestic and economic problems rather than to NASA?
I would say that they should remember what NASA does and what it has done historically, and that is to solve economic and societal problems. Today, people live far more robustly, much longer, much more comfortably than ever before, and while not totally a payback for NASA, a lot of it has to do with the technological and societal development that came about from the space program.
People don’t get lost nowadays, most people don’t. Some people still can’t follow a GPS, but if they rely on a GPS they can find places they never even knew existed as a result of space exploration and the development of navigational tools to help people go from one point in our solar system to another point, and now from one point on Earth to another point. A person can fall ill during a baseball game, for example, be picked up by an ambulance, and by the time they get to the hospital the doctor knows all their vital signs, knows everything about them, and it has all been set electronically, which all came about from the Apollo program. We had to know the vital signs, we had to know the conditions for astronauts on the moon, and we didn’t have a way to run a wire a quarter of a million miles, and so we developed wireless communications.
Today, we have a satellite that’s called the Lunar Atmosphere Dust Environment Experiment; boy that’s hard, just call it LADEE. LADEE went in to orbit around the moon. I know people say NASA has not been back to the moon, but we go to the moon a lot. We need to send humans back to the moon, and we will someday, but right now we have the satellite LADEE orbiting the moon, and on it is a very small experiment package and it’s not expensive and it’s a laser communicator that now sends incredibly high-frequency laser signals from the moon to Earth, and it’s as good as high-definition TV. That has come about because we at NASA need to be able to communicate better from great, great distances in deep space back to Earth, and we are trying to develop laser communication because it’s much better than the standard types of communication we have now.
And I could probably go on and on and on, but that makes a difference in people’s lives. That creates industry, which creates jobs, which creates economic benefits to the nation. The way to ensure we get people out of poverty and are able to feed people is to bring more money into our economy so that people can go to work and not live in poverty, and that’s the kind of stuff NASA promotes.
The Politic: Have the sequester cuts had a noticeable effect on the operations of NASA?
Yes, because every agency of the federal government – and many civilians who never thought they needed anything from the federal government – have felt the impact of the sequester cuts. Everybody is suffering from the sequester, and it’s only people who want to pretend we can get along without government that would say it has had no impact.
The Politic: Why should Americans desire an increased role for NASA in the future?
I don’t think Americans should single out NASA as an organization that they feel should get more money. They should look at it holistically and say: what can we do to enhance the economic benefits to the nation, to make our economy more robust, to create more jobs, to inspire people to want to go and become more and better educated, to inspire people to be scientists, doctors, and engineers? Historically, that has been accomplished when we put money into NASA and allow organizations like NASA and DARPA and the National Science Foundation, organizations that devote themselves to research and development and economic development, to do their jobs. So I would say the average citizen should be supportive of programs like these.