Former shuttle commander expected to become NASA chief

Retired Marine Maj. Gen. Charles F. Bolden Jr., a former shuttle commander, is expected to be named the new head of NASA, an administration official said.

Bolden is scheduled to meet with President Obama at the White House on Monday, and an announcement may come shortly afterward, the official said.

Bolden, 62, would succeed Michael Griffin, an aerospace engineer appointed by President George W. Bush. Griffin left NASA in January after overseeing a strategic shift to wind up the three-decade shuttle program and develop a spacecraft to send astronauts back to the moon.

The next administrator will need to persuade lawmakers to commit as much as $120 billion for a new lunar program to prepare for the longer-range objective of a manned flight to Mars.

Obama said in March that he wanted to restore a sense of excitement and interest around the space program. In his budget for the agency, Obama endorsed Bush’s plan to return astronauts to the lunar surface by 2020.

Bolden is chief executive of JackandPanther, a privately held military and aerospace consulting firm. The Columbia, S.C., native graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy in 1968 and flew more than 100 combat missions during the Vietnam War, according to NASA. He served as a military test pilot before becoming an astronaut in 1981. Bolden flew on four shuttle missions, commanding two of them, in 1992 and 1994.