WASHINGTON — NASA's online contest to name a new room at the international space station went awry: Comedian Stephen Colbert won.

The name "Colbert" beat NASA's four suggested options in the space agency's effort to have the public help name the addition. The new room will be launched later this year.

NASA's mistake was allowing write-ins. Colbert urged viewers of his Comedy Central show, "The Colbert Report," to write in his name. And they did, with 230,539 votes. That clobbered Serenity, one of the NASA choices, by more than 40,000 votes. Nearly 1.2 million votes were cast by the time the contest ended Friday.

NASA reserves the right to choose an appropriate name. Agency spokesman John Yembrick said NASA will decide in April, but will give top vote-getters "the most consideration."

WILLIAMS DOING WELL, PUBLICISTS SAY

NEW YORK — Robin Williams was recovering at the Cleveland Clinic after heart surgery that his doctors deemed successful, his publicists said yesterday.

The 57-year-old actor had an operation to replace an aortic valve on March 13, publicists Mara Buxbaum and Chris Kanarick said. He was expected to make a complete recovery in the next eight weeks.

Williams was initially treated at the University of Miami Hospital before being transferred to Cleveland. He had been in Florida earlier this month when he was forced to cancel the remainder of his one-man comedy show, "Weapons of Self-Destruction," after experiencing shortness of breath.

LETTERMAN, LONGTIME LOVE GET HITCHED

LOS ANGELES — David Letterman said he and longtime girlfriend Regina Lasko had a bumpy trip to matrimony last week.

During a taping yesterday of CBS' "Late Show," Letterman said he and Lasko married March 19 at the Teton County Courthouse in Choteau, Mont., but only after their truck got stuck on a muddy road.

Letterman and Lasko, whose son, Harry, was born in 2003, didn't take an immediate honeymoon. The late-night host, who has been dating Lasko since 1986, was back at work in New York yesterday to deliver the news.

PLATH'S SON TAKES HIS OWN LIFE

FAIRBANKS, Alaska — Nicholas Hughes, the son of poet Sylvia Plath, has killed himself, 46 years after his mother committed suicide and 40 years after his stepmother, Assia Wevill, did the same. He was 47.

Hughes, who was not married and had no children, hanged himself at his home March 16, Alaska state troopers said. A fisheries biologist, he spent nearly a decade on the faculty of the University of Alaska at Fairbanks and left in 2006, according to the university's Web site.

Nicholas Hughes was 9 months old when his parents, Plath and poet Ted Hughes, separated; they also had a daughter, poet Frieda Hughes. Ted Hughes died in 1998 of cancer.