Thanks, Charlie

So Charlie Bolden will be leaving the position of NASA administrator - a political appointment - noon Jan. 20, when President Barack Obama leaves office. Associate administrator Robert Lightfoot, a former director of Marshall SFC, will be acting administrator. (It's customary for the highest-ranking NASA civil servant to be acting administrator during presidential transitions.)

I'm not well-versed in the politics of NASA, but I've always found Charlie - as he preferred people to call him - to be personable and outgoing. I've had the pleasure of meeting him a few times, most notably when in 2011 when he was commencement speaker at Monmouth University. (Then-university president Paul Gaffney was a classmate of Bolden at the US Naval Academy in Annapolis.)

I'm not sure if I was an education reporter then, but my editor understood why I wanted to cover the graduation. As it turned out, the person that normally covered the event as sick that day, so most likely I would have been the reporter to do so anyway.

I got to sit at Charlie's table for lunch in addition to interviewing him for the paper. And we also got to talking about the Shuttle Launch Experience simulator at Kennedy Space Center - I broke the ice by mentioning that I had been there and got to see his smiling face narrating the pre-show. Charlie said that the movement of the seats was more realistic than the actual shuttle simulator at Johnson Space Center, where the astronauts trained. I still have the audio recording, and perhaps one day I'll get to transcribe it, maybe when the SLE gets replaced years from now.

Bolden didn't announce his post-January 20 plans. Wherever he goes, I'm sure he'll be successful. And I'll miss him.