"I trusted Charley with my life - and would do so again," Nelson said.
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."
Logsdon said he believes 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 that the administration plans to review the Ares rocket and Orion spacecraft that will replace the space shuttle by 2015, is not a shot across the bow of NASA's human spaceflight program, but rather more of a review of hardware.
Roger Launius, a space expert at the Smithsonian Institution, said it is too soon to know just how aggressively Bolden will support the Bush administration plan of returning to the moon by 2020 and going on to Mars from there. Or whether he will, as many expect, extend the life of the shuttle program to close the nearly five-year gap between the last shuttle flight and the first 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," he said. But "I think in Charley 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.
On a procedural note, a top White House official said Bolden would need a "limited waiver" from new ethics rules so his past would not violate conflict-of-interest regulations.
Until March 2008, Bolden served on the board of directors for GenCorp, whose Aerojet subsidiary makes propulsion systems and maneuvering engines for the space shuttle and a new crewed capsule designed to help return American astronauts to the moon.
