Charles Bolden talks to Ray Suarez

Ray Suarez: You've been on the job almost six years, and Curiosity rover is on Mars. We've got a mission heading out to look at Jupiter. We're getting ready to replace the Hubble telescope. They're groundbreaking things. But they're not necessarily all the same thing, which if you're watching from outside you might look and say, "Well, what's NASA for in 2015?"

Charles Bolden: Yes, the universe is a big place, and NASA since its inception has been about looking outward, helping us to understand the universe in which we live but, more importantly, helping us to understand this planet on which we live, because it all begins right here. We were established in 1958, and since then, we've been challenged by the National Space Act to make discoveries about our planet, make discoveries about the universe and, oh, by the way, continue to keep the U.S. first in aeronautics and space exploration.

Since I was a kid, and as a boomer I was right in the sweet spot for NASA's heyday as an agency. And John Glenn and Gus Grissom and on and on and on were figures that we talked about. Those days, I think it was very easy to answer the question "What is NASA for?" But as we're not emphasizing human-accompanied spaceflight as much. Is it a tougher sell?

NASA's heyday is today, to be quite honest. Our best days are ahead of us, and today is the best day for young men and women who want to be in aeronautics and in the aerospace field. You ticked off several of the things that we've done just in the past six years. And I'm incredibly proud of the 18,000 civil servants and almost 40,000 contractors now who make up our family. And I have to remind people all the time — everybody thinks of us as a technical organization. We are a people organization.

Oh, no knock at today's NASA. And I know you've got your virtual and physical fingers in a lot of different pies. But I think it's probably less well-known by the general public at large, and part of that must be that what concentrated our eyes on getting to the moon, that had us looking upward was the Cold War context, the space race, the idea that America had to be first in a lot of other things. And right now we're one player among many. There are a lot of players — I mean, China, India, Russia always. Is it as clear to the average American what NASA's for as it was when we were trying to beat the Russians to the moon?

I think the fact that there is no one player and that the players today include entrepreneurial interest, academic interest, American industry, foreign industry — the fact that, following President [Barack] Obama's direction to me, we have reached out and expanded the number of what we call nontraditional partners — that is a tribute to the work that NASA has done. The whole purpose of establishing a space agency in the form of NASA under our direction, from very beginning, was to take things that we develop, particularly technologies, and get them out into the marketplace. I was an adult when we set foot on the moon. Prior to that, I knew what astronauts were, but I was not inspired to be one.

I'm a little different than a lot of people for a lot of different reasons. The times were different then. I lived in the segregated South. So doing that was out of the question for me. Today I cannot find an American kid or a kid in any foreign country who doesn't at least, after they've seen me talk or heard me talk, doesn't at least have an inkling of thought that, you know, "I can do that." And that was not the "glory days." I think the glory days are today because it's today that we have expanded the interest in exploration, expanded the desire to be like us. We are the best nation in the world when it comes to exploration. There is nobody as good as we are. And it'll be some time before anyone's as good as we are. In two more years, we're going to be launching Americans from American soil. That will be key to having an American capability to get our own astronauts into space, will be key from a national pride standpoint. But we get Americans into space today. We have not missed a beat since we lost Columbia back in 2003.

Scott Kelly is on his way to the International Space Station.

He's there. He's having a good time. 

Well, he's going to be there for a year, so he better be having a good time. But he had to hitch a ride with the Russians. 

He didn't hitch a ride. I hear that term all the time. It was a planned evolution from the loss of Columbia to today, where we said, "OK, a couple of things we need to do. We need to get the International Space Station finished." That was an edict or a mandate out of the Columbia accident investigation board. And the other thing we need to do is we need to migrate away from shuttle and try to start using commercial entities for access to space. It took several presidents saying we were going to do that. But it took President Obama coming into office and saying, "Look, we've got to do this. You know, we need to do it." As a former shuttle pilot, I could not have agreed more. I came into NASA in 1980 to go to deep space. We weren't flying the space shuttle when I came in. That's how old I am. We were two years overdue. It was scheduled to fly in 1978 — 1980 I arrived, and we were still a year away from flying.

But we finally flew. We had an incredible 30-year run where we taught other nations. 

Well, Scott Kelly's going to orbit the Earth for a year. It's been a long time since an American has set foot on the moon. What's he going to do up there? Why is it important that he's there? What can we learn from long missions like that that applies to other things that you want to do?

Getting to space is very difficult. Getting to Mars is very, very, very difficult. We are going to get there in the 2030s. That is the ultimate objective of this administration and the current-day NASA with humans. We have been around and on Mars now for decades. We never left the moon. So those are things that we have already accomplished. But getting humans to Mars requires a lot more understanding of the human body and how it is affected by long-duration periods of time in a microgravity, higher radiation environment.

We need to develop our technologies a little bit better than they are today. We don't have resilient life support systems. So there are three things that we need. I always try to describe this as a three-legged stool, because everybody can relate to a three-legged stool. Leg No. 1 is absolutely critical because it's the beginning. We've got to be able to get to space. The second critical piece is the International Space Station. That is our toehold on the rest of the solar system, if not the universe. And then the third leg is our ability to go to deep space. And that's two things that we're developing right now. It's a heavy-lift launch vehicle. We call it the space launch system, or SLS. And it's a capsule. It's a module in which the crew will fly, and that we call Orion. And when we put the two of them together, we'll be able to get humans back to the area of the moon and on to Mars. If we don't have either one of those, we don't get to Mars. 

In terms of complexity, in terms of cost, in terms of risk, it's exponentially more difficult to get a living human being to Mars than research materials and tools and diggers and rovers and all kinds of other things. What is it about the human element that makes us willing to spend that extra money, take that extra risk and spend years more inventing the things that we need to do it in the first place?

We seek to go to Mars in particular with humans because it's in our DNA. It is a basic, fundamental manner of curiosity, if you will, for the human species to be able to survive on more than one planet. So that's one reason. The second reason is because Mars tells us a lot about our own planet Earth. We need to understand this planet a lot better than we do. Mars used to be like Earth, we believe. Mars now has a very thin atmosphere. Mars is now barren and desolate. We think the solar winds have scraped off Mars' atmosphere. So we want to understand that, because we don't want this planet to one day be the way that Mars is today. So you've got to send humans at some point.

You know, recently a call went out for people who were willing to make a one-way trip to Mars. Would they accept the training? Would they go on the mission, understanding that they would never come back¿ And there was no shortage of people who wanted to try it. I bet you can relate to that.

I can relate to that. However, I promised people — when I go out and say I want young people, and I will use the term "young," meaning age, because I probably won't get to go to Mars — we're not doing this for my generation. I am doing it for the generation of my granddaughters and younger, because we're about 20 years away from going to Mars, getting ready to slip under the 20-year time frame. And so it's going to be those that we've got to inspire. And I tell them all the time, "I'm not going to send you on a one-way mission. I am determined that we will have the technologies, we will understand the human body and its functions so that I can safely get you to Mars, have you live on the planet for a year or whatever period of time it is and then safely bring you back. So that, one, you can talk about it, you can help us prepare other people who are going to go, because we're kind of like pioneers. You know, we're crossing the mountains, heading over to see what's over there." But there is a lot of work to be done before we can safely have people stay. And I need to have people come back and talk about it and tell us about what they experienced.

There’s a new Congress, and in the Senate, the chairman of the [Space, Science and Competitiveness Subcommittee, Ted Cruz,] is someone who is quite happy to tell you that he is not sure that humans are capable of making changes in the atmosphere that change the climate. He wondered about all the Earth science and observatory work that your agency is doing during a recent hearing. Are you a little surprised that you're still having to explain that to people — and not just anybody but a guy who is pretty high up the food chain and also has some of your fate in his hands?

President Obama has equipped this agency with $107 billion over the six-year period of time I've been here. And if my numbers serve me correctly, about $49 billion of that has been devoted to human spaceflight and about $11 billion devoted to Earth science. I happen to be one who believes that the most important planet in the universe — and we have now discovered thousands — the most important planet in the universe is the one on which we live. And our job here at NASA is to create incredible ground-shaking instruments, satellites that provide data to decision-makers. Everything we do in this agency is with the express purpose of making life better for people here on Earth. And I think we do that.

Do you think you convinced Sen. Cruz that the human beings can change the climate?

Let me tell you what I tell my daughter and other young ladies. They struggle every day to become a fully integrated part of our society because women and minorities are still not fully accepted in our society as capable of being contributing members. And I tell them every single day, "Look, don't waste your time trying to talk somebody into accepting you. Do your job. Do it well. And then if they don't get it, you will either be their boss and, you know, you can get rid of them or what." I don't worry about trying to change someone's mind. I try to present data that is very accurate. We say, "This is what we're going to do. We understand the president wants this. The Congress wants this. The American people want it. We're going to do this. We're going to do it at that cost, and we're going to do it on this schedule." And every single year we have gotten better and better and better at being able to deliver on time, on cost or sometimes under cost. Every once in a while we have a burp, but that happens in any organization. 

You were born into a segregated society in South Carolina. You've been to space a bunch of times. You ended your active-duty career as a major general in the United States Marine Corps. Something that would have been unimaginable when you were born. It seems like a good time to take stock. I mean, you work for a black president.

All the time, all the time. I don't take anything for granted. My granddaughters are from a mixed marriage. So I have to explain to them, because of the shade of their skin, why Black History Month is important. But I try to explain to them the significance of Selma and the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act and the critical importance of that. I'm a part of this administration, and I am a part of the leadership of the greatest nation on Earth. And so I have to remind people we are where we are today, I am here where I am today because people died and sacrificed so that I can do this.

You watched the events of the last 12 months. Then you pick up the paper and see Scott Kelly with his Russian counterpart heading up into space. Do we get along better right now with Russians off of the surface of the planet Earth than we do right here on it?

I think we've always gotten along with everyone off the planet better than we have on it for one simple reason. We're mission-focused. We have a concrete mission. That mission right now, there are five partner entities that run the International Space Station, and we are focused on making sure that the International Space Station is effectively utilized. We are all focused on eventually getting humans to Mars. That's an agreement among all the nations that are part of the International Space Station program. And so that is a singular focus for all of us. 

On one of those visits to the moon, we left a plaque that said, "We came in peace to serve all mankind." And that just sounded like some more of that idealistic frabajaba. But now that we're actually going into space with people from other places on Earth and working with them up there, sharing information, telling people what we know, learning from what they've learned, it now seems more real to me in the 21st century that we may do something up there that serves all mankind than it did in 1967, when we had missiles pointed at each other and this was very much an American operation getting up there.

You know, I am blessed to have the opportunity to have seen this planet from a little bit different vantage point than the average person has an opportunity to see it. My last flight in space was with a person who is one of my best friends today, Sergei Konstantinovich Krikalev, the first Russian cosmonaut to fly on an American spacecraft, in the beginning of the shuttle-Mir era. And Sergei and I look back on our lives every once in a while and, you know, he for a while ran the Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center outside of Moscow and Star City. And I became the NASA administrator. And the two of us kind of look at each other and go, "Hey, how did they make these mistakes?" 

But we you know, we understand. The first time I met him, we talked at dinner. And I was not anxious to fly a flight with a Russian cosmonaut. But I met Sergei and Vladimir Titov, who was his backup. And we talked all night about our kids and what we wanted for the world.

Throughout the years, people have looked at the tremendous cost of doing space exploration and then looked at the problems on Earth and said, "Boy, that would feed a lot of people." To those people who've heard the litany of basic science and breakthroughs that you've just mentioned, what would you close with to tell them this is all worth it. 

It is all worth it. And they should be glad that their tax money is going to it because our mission or our vision is to pursue the unknown, to reach for new heights to pursue the unknown so that everything we do makes life better here on Earth. I am incredibly proud that we could spend the money elsewhere. We chose to spend it on technology and exploration and discoveries that make life here on Earth better. The developments that we are doing right now — technological developments on the International Space Station, water purification, miniaturization of medical instruments — those things are now in villages and small towns all over the world making life better for people.

They never would have been done had we not had the necessity to do that because we had people living in a very hostile environment that we call space. So we are in fact spending every single dime of the taxpayers' money to make life better here on Earth. I contend that that's much better than what you could do by taking that money and distributing it to individual people or individual locations or whatever you have. So everything we do makes life better here on Earth. Every single dime of the taxpayer's money adds to the amount of effort that goes into teaching kids STEM-related courses. So my $18 billion budget, I take $18 billion and put it on STEM education and put it on feeding people. And some folks may say, "You being cute." I'm not being cute. Ask a young lady who is an expectant mother in some village in South America who now has a midwife with a doctor 200 miles away and the midwife has a little instrument that they can look at the fetus and beam it to a doctor wirelessly 200 miles away so that the doctor can tell. That's space exploration being delivered to that village. Or somebody who is drinking clean drinking water and cutting down on the death rate of infants. So those are some of the results that come serendipitously in many cases from NASA research and technology development.

This interview has been edited and condensed.