[ music ] >> Youngbloods got no sense of history.

>> Space is black.

Except for where the stars are, it's the absence of light and the inability to know where you're going.

But people that I consider to be the best-qualified to get there are people who look like me.

[ music ] >> When I was your age, the story hour was always very important to me.

As I remember them, our stories almost always began with "Once upon a time."

Once upon a time there was a little boy.

His name was Charles F. Bolden Jr. >> My formal name is Charles Bolden, but I go by Charlie Bolden, Major General of the United States Marine Corps, retired and the 12th NASA Administrator, in addition to being a four-time shuttle pilot from NASA.

[ music ] My mother founded the first library-- elementary school library for Black children in Columbia, South Carolina, in the '40s when she came out of Johnson C. Smith University.

My father served in the-- in the Army throughout World War II and came home to go back to teaching and coaching.

And he coached and taught many of the young men who went on to become stars in the National Football League or-or in the NBA or other places.

And my mom and dad taught me to be a leader.

They were leaders in their own right in our community.

[ music ] I grew up in the segregated South, so I am a son of the South, if you will.

Blacks and whites went to separate schools.

They had separate facilities and everything.

[ music ] Well, my father had served along with most men his age in World War II in the U.S. Army being members of the greatest generation.

So that's where I saw the Naval Academy.

I fell in love with the uniforms more than anything else.

And the beauty of the-- what's called the Yard, it's the campus of the U.S.

Naval Academy, a sense of discipline, organization, and opportunity to be of service to other people.

I began to understand what the military was all about.

I had sworn when I went to the Naval Academy.

Two things, I would not go into the Marine Corps because they were crazy, and I would not fly airplanes because that was inherently dangerous.

When it was time to graduate and I became a marine intending to be an infantry officer, but found out I really did not like crawling around in the mud.

My wife did not like the prospect of me being an infantry officer going off to Vietnam, where the life expectancy of a second lieutenant was expressed in weeks and months.

And she convinced me to go to flight school, a place I said I was not going to go.

When I went there, my first flight, I fell in love with it.

You know, I could not believe that this was something I did not want to do.

And it was while I was serving as a test pilot on a place called Patuxent River, Maryland, I had the privilege of meeting one of the three Black astronauts who integrated NASA's Astronaut Corps.

But I knew that there were three Black astronauts in that first class of 1978, but I didn't know any of them.

Ron McNair, Fred Gregory and Guion Bluford.

Ron stepped out of the back of the NASA T-38, one of the four or five that had come back for a reunion, and I couldn't believe it.

The late, great Dr. Ron McNair.

>> I'm sure Charles Bolden and Charles Duke would agree with me and tell you that... the road between South Carolina and spaceflight is not a very simple one, nor is it one filled with guarantees.

In fact, the only guarantees to be found are those that reside in the unchallenged depths of one's own determination.

The true courage of spaceflight is not strapping into one's seat prior to liftoff.

It is not sitting aboard six million pounds of fire and thunder, as one rocket had said, all the way from the planet.

But the true courage comes in enduring, and, as Colonel Bolden has said, persevering the preparation and believing in oneself.

>> Ron represented something very special.

He and I talked most of the weekend, and as I took him back to the flight line to get in his sleek looking supersonic NASA T-38 and speed back to Houston, he said, "Hey, are you going to apply for the program?"

And I said, "Not on your life."

And I was serious.

He said, "Why not?"

I said, "You know, they'd never pick me, Ron."

And he said, "That is the dumbest thing I ever heard.

How do you know if you don't ask?"

Just that statement from Ron embarrassed me more than anything else because it reminded me of what my mom and dad had taught me as I grew up in the segregated South.

People are going to try to keep you from doing things and tell you what you cannot do, but you determine what it is you want to do, and only you can determine that.

Never, ever, ever let anybody tell you what you can't do and don't give up on yourself.

And I had forgotten that.

So when Ron's airplane took off, I went home and I told my wife, "Okay, I think I'm going to apply for the space program.

I don't think I stand a snowball's chance in hell.

But-but I'm-- I owe it to myself to apply."

[ music ] >> NASA, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration... >> When I got selected to come down to Houston to interview-- you come down for a week.

I was blown away by the Johnson Space Center and everything about it.

The people there, the flight controllers, the trainers, just everybody there was really enthusiastic about the work they were doing.

They were all excited about this thing called the Space Shuttle.

I was there from the ground up of the development of the Space Shuttle.

[ fire exhaustion ] And I had an opportunity to meet other people like me who were flying.

And I came back home and I told my wife, I said, you know, that was the most incredible thing I've ever done.

I don't stand a snowball's chance in hell of being selected.

Those are really-- really, really smart people with whom I was associating this past week.

And what I think I had overlooked was NASA's not looking for the most brilliant people.

They're not looking for the-- the, you know, the Nobel laureates and the like.

They're looking for people who are team players, who know how to follow orders, who are not bashful whatsoever about speaking up with-with new and sometimes crazy ideas.

And they're looking for what we call the whole person, somebody who's very well rounded, you know, is in good shape, not excellent shape, but in good shape, relatively smart-- relatively so.

[ laughter ] >> There's sound, Chatlie.

So watch what you say.

[ mechanical click ] >> And very busy or very active in the outside community, that somebody that's going to contribute to the community.

So I-I fit the bill for that.

And I guess that's why I was selected.

>> After one year of training, he qualified as an astronaut.

With this, he became one of the then four African-American astronauts in the NASA program.

In the whole world, for that matter.

>> I would like to introduce to you the Crew Commander, Colonel Charles F. Bolden.

>> Thank you very much, Barbara.

And I think all of you know me by now.

I'm Charlie Bolden, and we're pleased to be here with you.

I wouldn't say I've worked to become a leader in my class or in the Astronaut Office.

But over time, the way I have behaved and performed put me in the increasing positions of leadership in the Astronaut Office.

[ music ] Where I thought I didn't belong, it turned out that not only did I belong, some people will say I excelled.

>> For four decades, Charlie and I have been close.

This friendship is formed in the crucible of a very tense and demanding situation.

You have to be a crew, and a crew supports each other, but the members of the crew defer to the leaders.

And Charlie was that leader.

Is it any wonder then President Obama would choose Charlie as the Administrator of NASA?

The man I'm about to introduce is a patriot, a leader, and a visionary.

He's been there, done that.

Ladies and gentlemen, the Administrator of NASA, Charlie Bolden.

[ applause ] >> Thank you very much.

I served as the NASA administrator for two terms, for both terms of President Obama's presidency, And-and it was a very interesting time.

Please join me in welcoming the President of the United States, President Barack Obama.

My wife and I were living in Houston.

I thought I had retired and I was asked if I would accept the president's nomination to-- to become the NASA Administrator.

And I did.

And I went back to Washington, and the first thing I found out was I didn't have a clue about politics, and what went on there, and how you did business and everything.

So I found myself immediately thrown into a leadership situation for which I was unbelievably well-prepared, But I didn't know it, because my idea of what I was going to have to do as a leader, as the leader of NASA, the leader of human spaceflight, the leader of science, the leader of space stuff for the whole world.

Because everybody looks to NASA around the world as the leaders when it comes to space science and aeronautics and exploration.

If you've ever heard of... there is something called the imposter syndrome.

It's a feeling that people get.

I get all the time, that, uh, you don't belong where you are, and it's really important for you to recognize that you that you're suffering from the imposter syndrome, because it is a syndrome.

It's not real.

You do belong where you are.

But-but you have had people put doubts in your mind for so long.

And I had grown up in the segregated South where, you know, I was taught to believe things like being the NASA Administrator or, like, being the President of the United States were not things to which I should aspire.

That's not what black people did.

What I learned very quickly was the fact that I had a-- a characteristic, or an ability that not-- not everybody in Washington, D.C. has.

When I became the NASA Administrator, I won't say it was because of my own personal ability, but it was because I had learned a long time ago that I'm never the smartest person in the room, and that the most valuable thing I could do would be to surround myself with people who were much smarter than I was.

Because in leadership, no matter how qualified you are, when the answer is needed, they're going to come to you if you're the leader, and you're going to have to give them the answer.

And that's the way it was as the NASA administrator.

But I was much better prepared for it from my kitchen table.

Growing up in Columbia, South Carolina, I just didn't know it.

>> Now, this is a true story, but it seems more like a fairy tale.

That a little African-American boy from Columbia, South Carolina, could grow up to be one of 202 persons in the whole world, when he made his first trip to orbit the Earth.

>> From-- from having the opportunity to do what?

Not very much more than 300 Americans have done, and just over 600 people in the history of the planet have had an opportunity to venture away from the surface of our planet and go far enough out where you see large portions of Earth at any given time.

And-and it dramatically changes your perspective.

The vision, the image that I shall have in my mind of Earth forever.

If I don't get to go to the moon or on to Mars, which I still hope to do, is an image that's taken from my second flight to space, where we deployed the Hubble Space Telescope, and we went to 600 kilometers, or 400 nautical miles above Earth, which at the time was higher than anyone had ever been in a circular orbit of Earth, not going to the moon.

And it's coming up nicely.

And-and then images of the Middle East, and it was taken with an IMAX camera mounted in the payload bay of the Shuttle Discovery that we had used to image the Hubble Space Telescope coming out as we gifted it out of the payload bay and then released it.

>> Houston to Discovery.

Okay, [ indistinct ], we've been taking marks, residuals and ratios look good.

>> We concur, Charlie.

>> Looking at-at Earth from that vantage point and looking at... Northeastern, uh, Egypt, the Sudan, looking into the Sinai Peninsula, the Mediterranean Sea up around Israel, where it comes down to Jordan and then goes into the Gulf of Aqaba and looking at western Saudi Arabia and remembering that if I had taken that picture or if I had snapped the picture a few seconds later, you would have been looking at Iran and Afghanistan and those parts of the world.

And I knew at the time that it was among the most violent places on earth.

But from the vantage point of space, there was no evidence that we-- that human beings lived there.

I felt insignificant as a-- as a-- as an Earthling, as a person from this planet, because there was no sign that human beings lived down there.

It was peaceful, and serene, and beautiful.

And, uh, you look at the beauty of the planet where there are no borders, no boundaries, and you recognize pretty quickly that all this talk about division among people is something that-that comes out of our heads or it's generated by human beings who just don't seem to be able to get along with each other.

As I said, my mother was a librarian, so I grew up loving books and poetry and stuff like that.

My favorite poet is a woman by the name of Nikki Giovanni.

Nikki Giovanni is a civil rights leader, and she is now a professor of English at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Virginia.

I remember growing up in the segregated South listening to many of her civil rights poems that were pretty-- pretty dynamic, and some very colorful.

[ chanting, whistles blowing ] >> If I can't do what I want to do, then my job is to not do what I don't want to do.

It's not the same thing, but it's the best I can do.

If I can't have what I want, then my job is to want what I've got, and be satisfied that at least there is something more to want.

>> She wrote a poem many years ago, and it's called "Quilting The Black Eyed Peas."

We are going to Mars.

And this was before we started talking about taking trips to Mars.

>> I met Dr. Bolden when he was the head of-of NASA.

I'm not going to-- I'm too old, and they're not going to let me go into space.

But I would love to-- to spend my last few years, if I knew what they would be, just going around the galaxy and seeing what's out there.

Because if there is life in our galaxy, other than Earth itself, third planet from the Yellow Sun, and it would be up to, if I may, someone black who would run into it, who would see it, and welcome it, because we welcome everything.

And I think that that's one of the strengths of black America.

We would have opened our arms to everybody.

I think that that's a great thing.

I happen to agree with Nikki that the people best-suited to lead that first mission are people who look like me.

People who descended from folk who came through the middle passage from the continent of Africa to the United States, what became the United States, with no idea whatsoever of what they were facing.

Laying stomach to stomach, sometime in the bowels of the slave ships, very seldom having an opportunity to come up to the deck, to even see the sun or the sky.

And that's the way the trip to Mars is going to be.

We're going to be holed up in our spaceship, and the first few days we're going to be able to look back at our planet Earth, and we'll see this little blue dot.

And after a couple of weeks, that little blue dot is going to almost disappear.

And there will come a time somewhere in that eight-month journey when it doesn't make any difference which direction you look.

You're not going to know where you're going, and you're not going to know where you came from, because it's all going to look just kind of... woo!

It's going to be black.

[ music ] >> We're going to Mars for the same reason Marco Polo rocketed to China, for the same reason Columbus trimmed his sails on the dream of spices.

For the very same reason Shackleton was enchanted with pendants, for the reason we fall in love, it's the only adventure.

We're going to Mars because Perry couldn't go to the North Pole without Matthew Henson, because Chicago couldn't be a city without Jean Baptiste du Sable.

Because George Washington Carver and his peanut were the right partners for Booker T. It's a life-seeking thing.

[ music ]