Things get darker in Washington

The new head of NASA, according to this article by the BBC, is a retired astronaut (no surprise there) and a black one (no surprise there, either):

President Barack Obama has chosen retired astronaut Charles Bolden to lead Nasa, ending months of speculation about the position. Lori Garver, a former NASA official and space adviser to the Obama campaign, was named as his deputy. Both positions require Senate confirmation. If confirmed, Major General Bolden, 62, would be only the second astronaut to lead NASA during its fifty-year history. Vice Admiral Richard Truly, who ran NASA from 1989-1992, was the first. "He's a real leader," George Abbey, a former head of NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, and friend of Bolden, told the Associated Press news agency. "NASA has been looking for a leader like this that they could have confidence in."
Major General Bolden grew up in segregated South Carolina and flew more than one hundred combat sorties in Vietnam. He joined NASA in 1980 and is a veteran of four space shuttle flights, commanding the mission that launched the Hubble Space Telescope into orbit in 1990. He inherits the space agency at a critical time in its history. In 2004, President George W. Bush instigated ambitious plans to return astronauts to the Moon by 2020, necessitating the replacement of the shuttle by a new space vehicle. However, the new Ares-Orion vehicle is not expected to be ready until 2015. So, for five years after the shuttle's retirement in 2010, American astronauts will be dependent on Russia to fly them into orbit on their space capsule Soyuz. In addition, some of NASA's biggest science programs are over-budget. This month, the White House ordered a sweeping review of NASA's manned spaceflight strategy.
Earlier this year, retired Air Force General Scott Gration was said to be favoured for the position. However, his bid reportedly ran into opposition on Capitol Hill. In April, the previous NASA administrator, Dr Michael Griffin, joined the University of Alabama in Huntsville as a professor of aerospace and mechanical engineering.

Rico says we less-pigmented folks are going to have to get used to this phenomenon... (And can you imagine what the Russians are going to start charging us once the shuttle is retired?)