The unanimous late Wednesday vote came shortly after the space shuttle Endeavour successfully blasted off toward the International Space Station (ISS) after five scuttled launch attempts in a month.

It also coincided with the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing on July 20, 1969.

The 12th NASA administrator since the agency was created in 1958, Bolden succeeds engineer and scientist Michael Griffin.

Lori Garver, 48, who was the lead civil space policy advisor to President Barack Obama's presidential campaign, was confirmed to take up the agency's number two job as deputy administrator. It will be her second stint at NASA, where she served as associate administrator from 1998 to 2001.

Bolden, 62, has flown on four space missions -- including two he commanded -- and previously served for 14 years as a member of the NASA's Astronaut Office.

"Today, we have to choose. Either we can invest in building on our hard-earned world technological leadership or we can abandon this commitment, ceding it to other nations who are working diligently to push the frontiers of space," he said in a statement.

"If we choose to lead, we must build on our investment in the International Space Station, accelerate development of our next generation launch systems to enable expansion of human exploration, enhance NASA's capability to study Earth's environment."

Bolden also called for NASA to "lead space science to new achievements, continue cutting-edge aeronautics research, support the innovation of American entrepreneurs, and inspire a rising generation of boys and girls to seek careers in science, technology, engineering and math."

As a Marine Corps fighter pilot, Bolden flew combat missions over North and South Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos during the Vietnam War.

He graduated from the US Naval Test Pilot School at Patuxent River, Maryland in 1979 and the following year was selected as an astronaut by NASA, where he held several technical and administrative posts, including assistant deputy administrator at the agency's headquarters in Washington.

His first space flight was as a pilot on board the space shuttle Columbia.

Bolden piloted the Discovery shuttle that deployed the Hubble space telescope in 1990, and commanded two further shuttle missions, including a historic first joint US-Russian mission on Discovery in 1994.

That same year, he left NASA to return to active duty in the Marines, rising to the rank of major general and deputy commander of US forces in Japan before his retirement in 2003.

Bolden's confirmation came as a White House panel is reviewing the controversial Constellation space program launched by former president George W. Bush in 2004 after he decided to phase out shuttle flights by 2010.

Constellation aims to take Americans back to the moon by 2020 and to serve as a launch pad for manned voyages to Mars and beyond.

But NASA's budget is not big enough to cover the cost of Constellation's Orion capsule, a more advanced and spacious version of the Apollo lunar module, and the Ares I and Ares V launchers needed to put it in orbit.

Obama's commission of experts, led by former Lockheed Martin chief executive Norman Augustine, is scheduled to make its recommendations by the end of August.

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