President Obama is considering whether to name retired Marine Corps Brig. Gen. Charles F. Bolden Jr., 62, a former astronaut, as the first black NASA administrator.

Bolden would succeed Michael Griffin.

It has been almost a third of a year since Griffin resigned from the top NASA post, and critics have asked why such an important position at the space agency was permitted to remain vacant for so long, when many NASA programs are at critical stages.

Several different people have been said to be on the verge of taking the job, but then drifted away. One problem confronting NASA is that Obama has provided a funding plus-up for the impending fiscal year ending Sept. 30, 2010, but then the base budget flatlines at less than $19 billion total per year for the next several years.

That comes at a time when the Constellation Program developing the next spaceship system (such as the Orion space capsule for crew and the Ares I rocket) will be moving into high-spending years.

A Columbia, S.C., native, Bolden is a Naval Academy graduate (1968), and has some 6,000 hours of flight time, including service as a Vietnam veteran who flew more than 100 sorties into Nam, and as a graduate of the U.S. Naval Test Pilot School at Patuxent River, Md.

As an astronaut, Bolden has compiled more than 680 space hours, serving on several space shuttle missions: STS-61C in 1986, and STS-31 in 1990 when Space Shuttle Discovery launched the Hubble Space Telescope. (Please see full story on the Hubble repair mission in this issue.) Bolden also served as commander of STS-45 in 1992 and STS-60 in 1994.