(Newswire.net — October 24, 2019) — Born on August 19, 1946, Charles Bolden is a former U.S. Navy pilot and astronaut, and the first African-American to head NASA, the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Agency, as a permanent position.
Bolden was appointed to that post by Barack Obama in 2009, and he remained in that position until January 2017, when he resigned after the arrival of the new Donald Trump administration.
He became an astronaut in August 1981 and flew into space four times over the course of thirteen years, during which he spent sixteen hours as a pilot on his first two trips, and eighty hours during his later two trips where he was the flight commander.
After becoming the NASA chief administrator, he announced that “we will turn science fiction into science,” and cited Obama’s renewed interest in science and math as major tasks entrusted to him, deepening NASA’s cooperation with other world agencies. Bolden also said that President Obama wanted him to help Muslim nations to “feel good about their historic contribution to science,” a remark that caused a stir.
“When I became the NASA administrator, (President Obama) charged me with three things,” Bolden said in the interview to Al Jazeera. “One, he wanted me to help re-inspire children to want to get into science and math; he wanted me to expand our international relationships; and third, and perhaps foremost, he wanted me to find a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with dominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science, math and engineering.”
“His [Bolden’s] idea of ‘to feel good about your past scientific achievements’ is the worst kind of group therapy, psycho-babble, imperial condescension and adolescent diplomacy. If I didn’t know that Obama had told him this, I’d demand the firing of Charles Bolden,” said Fox News Channel commentator Charles Krauthammer.
Charles Bolden, was put on sick leave for 6 months, after he publicly declared that an extraterrestrial invasion would take place before 2025.
During Bolden’s leadership of NASA, the long-term goal was to send a man to Mars, but perhaps the most interesting thing about him were his religious views. Specifically, there is a misconception that science and religion are irreconcilable, though this negates the entire history of the past five millennia, during which science and religion have always gone hand in hand.
Furthermore it can be said that science could not exist without religion, because the ancient peoples begun to observe the cosmos from religious motives.
But this is a general outlook, so the head of the world’s most powerful space agency is not expected to be a believing Christian, nor to claim that there must be life outside Earth.
“I am a Christian, so in my faith I am learning about the almighty, omnipresent God, which means He is everywhere. He is omniscient. He does everything. And I cannot state my brain to believe that such a God would choose a planet from one of millions of suns and say: that is the only place in the vast universe that I will put some form of life on. So the only problem is I didn’t go far enough” Bolden said.