Obama's NASA selection is a boost for manned spaceflight

Former NASA Administrator Mike Griffin called Bolden "a great choice."

"He deserves the status of national hero. This is a guy who has spent most of his life serving his country," Griffin said.

Logsdon said he believed the skepticism about Obama's support for manned flight was "misguided" from the first. The comment about taking money from NASA was made by a junior campaign aide, he said.

He added that a recent announcement of the administration's plans to review the Ares 1 rocket and Orion spacecraft, which are to replace the space shuttle by 2015, is not a shot across the bow of NASA's human spaceflight program.

He said it would be a review of the hardware, not the destination or goals.

Roger Launius, a space expert at the Smithsonian Institution, said it was too soon to know how aggressively Bolden would support President George W. Bush's plan of returning astronauts to the moon by 2020 and later going to Mars. Or whether Bolden would, as many expect, extend the life of the shuttle program to close the nearly five-year gap between the last scheduled shuttle flight and the first planned flight of the Ares-Orion system, a period during which NASA astronauts would have to beg rides on Soviet rockets.

"We don't know exactly what this means yet," Launius said. But "I think in Charlie Bolden you'll have an individual who will be strong enough to speak to the administration" when he thinks the agency is going in the wrong direction.

One possible stumbling block to Bolden's approval by the Senate could be new ethics rules designed to prevent conflicts of interest. An Obama executive order prohibits appointees from doing work that is "directly and substantially related" to a former employer or former clients.

Until March 2008, Bolden served on the board of directors for Rancho Cordova, Calif.-based GenCorp Inc., whose Aerojet subsidiary makes propulsion systems and maneuvering engines for the space shuttle and the Orion spacecraft. He would probably need a "limited waiver" from the regulations to head NASA.

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john.johnson@latimes.com

The Orlando Sentinel contributed to this report.