Discovery 
Lust in Space
Laugh all you want at Lisa Nowak, the lovesick astronaut in the diaper, but there’s nothing even remotely funny about the shuttle program’s bleak future— or the sorry state of NASA.
Kerry Soileau says: Puhleeeeze. This is a very sexist article. Would such a sympathetic piece have been written had the sexes of the participants been reversed? Would you sympathize with a MAN who traveled across several states to confront a MAN with implements of violence? She’s a criminal and a dangerous one at that. Her being a woman doesn’t mitigate that in the least. (February 18th, 2011 at 11:17am)
We may never know exactly what was in Lisa Marie Nowak’s heart—what she thought, felt, believed, or dreamed. How desperately she loved or how compulsively she hated. Or why she would do something, entirely of her own free will, that was guaranteed to ruin the extraordinary life she had spent 43 years meticulously crafting. Maybe someday she’ll write a memoir or, sunk in shame and isolation, sell her story to Hollywood and offer up her social and professional suicide for money and another kind of fame. As time passes, there may be little else for her to do.
Until then, we are left to construct our own dossier, composed solely of the hard, objective facts of the narrative. We begin with the most basic of these: Lisa was an astronaut. For more than a decade she was part of that cold-blooded, nerveless band of overachievers that the rest of the world looks upon as the embodiment of human perfection. She flew a single mission on the space shuttle, in the summer of 2006. She is a mom. She is quite thin—five feet four inches tall and 110 pounds—with light-brown shoulder-length hair and bangs; with makeup on and her hair done, she can look pretty in a homespun, American sort of way. Although she is quiet and, as you will soon see, compartmentalized, the personality she showed to the world was one that everyone liked and admired: cheerful, diligent, smart, caring, nice, brave.
Against that backdrop, consider a letter she wrote in January 2007 that might help explain, to people who know nothing else about her, her shocking actions in the early-morning hours of February 5. It was addressed to a Mrs. Oefelein, the mother of her lover, a 42-year-old former Navy pilot and fellow astronaut named Bill Oefelein. Their affair had begun three years earlier, coinciding with the end of his marriage and the coming apart of hers. In spite of such stormy, emotional times, the letter was hopeful and happy. It suggested that Lisa and Bill were about to start a new life together, that the trials and the secrecy of the preceding few years would soon be over. “Bill is absolutely the best person I’ve ever known and I love him more than I knew possible,” Lisa wrote. “Your kindness [in] supporting us even under such circumstances as have existed in the past is nothing short of extraordinary. Fortunately that past situation is finally coming to a close with formal separation and separate living arrangements accomplished, and I am in the process of completing all the official divorce paperwork. It is long overdue, but it is finally here and I am very much looking forward to getting to know you even better.”
If the takeaway was that everything was going to work out fine, the reality was otherwise. Lisa was catastrophically misguided. Even as she was writing to Mrs. Oefelein, Bill was in the process of dumping her for a girlish thirty-year-old Air Force captain from Cape Canaveral, Florida, named Colleen Shipman. A few weeks later, he would tell Lisa that he and Colleen had decided to become “exclusive.” It is perhaps a measure of Bill’s capacity for self-delusion that he believed Lisa was “accepting” of this (as he later told police). He was wrong. A week later, wearing a diaper and carrying a hunting knife, a BB gun, plastic gloves, a steel mallet, a can of pepper spray, and six feet of rubber tubing, she would drive nine hundred miles from her home in Houston to the Orlando airport. There, at 3:50 a.m., in a wig and a hooded trench coat, she would assault Colleen in a parking lot with pepper spray. At that moment, Lisa Nowak became globally infamous as the love-crazed “astronut” who had attacked her rival. She became what no astronaut had ever before become: a punch line.
If the story of the Nowak-Oefelein-Ship-man love triangle allowed an unusual and occasionally bizarre view of the traditionally opaque NASA subculture, it offered something else too: a peek inside the world of America’s space agency in the dying days of the shuttle program and in the shadow of a disastrous crash—Columbia, in 2003—that illustrated in excruciating detail just how fundamentally purposeless, money guzzling, overpressurized, and phenomenally dangerous the shuttle was 26 years after its first mission. Columbia, in fact, shattered NASA’s bureaucratic nerves; it spawned an astonishing report by the Columbia Accident Investigation Board (CAIB) that concluded that the shuttle program was still little more than a perilous and costly experiment and that the crash was caused as much by NASA’s deeply flawed culture as it was by the piece of foam from the fuel tank that fatally damaged the craft’s heat shield. The report also laid bare the shuttle’s stark failure to fulfill almost all of NASA’s promises about the craft’s uses and capabilities.
If you’re like many Americans, shuttle missions occupy a place in your consciousness somewhere between Arena Football League scores and the latest headlines from Belgium. Except when one blows up, of course—but even then, most people feel that there’s something almost boringly routine about our trips to space. Nothing could be further from the truth. The shuttle is, in actuality, a horrifically fragile and pathologically balky patchwork of far-flung technologies, many of which are a generation old. To get its three million pieces into orbit without exploding or disintegrating requires an astonishing amount of money and effort: as much as $1 billion and 20,000 workers every time it blasts off, even though the shuttles themselves are reused. “You should hold your breath every time it goes up,” says Wayne Hale, the shuttle program’s manager. That gigantic price tag is one of the main reasons that America, after conquering the moon, has been stuck in low earth orbit for almost 35 years.
The crash of Columbia caused two things to happen. The first was President George W. Bush’s decision to stop flying the shuttle in 2010—the biggest and most shattering change at NASA since the end of the Apollo program in the seventies. The second was a sudden, manic drive not only to get back into space but to do it without any more crashes or the harrowing close calls that have become more and more common in recent years. This was accompanied by an equally peremptory demand to finish the $100 billion International Space Station—another purposeless project that, ironically, NASA soon plans to abandon.
In the middle of all of this quantum change sat Lisa Nowak, a mission specialist on STS-121, the thirty-second flight of the shuttle Discovery and the second shuttle to fly after Columbia. Her personal and professional life was deeply etched by the accident, which took the life of one of her best friends; her own mission in space was obsessed with both the causes of the crash and the ways NASA might avoid future disasters by making repairs in space. (It did not escape notice either that her assault on Colleen happened a few days after the fourth anniversary of the Columbia tragedy.) She and her crew were critical components of that final phase of the shuttle’s tortured life, in which everything had to be done at once, everything had to be perfect, and all goals had to be achieved.
Her arrest rocked NASA to its foundation. It did so in ways that surprised even insiders who had been through the shock waves of Challenger (the first shuttle disaster, in 1986) and Columbia. The reason was rooted in the fact that, for all of its intergalactic operations, NASA is, at bottom, a myth-spinning public relations machine, a giant image factory whose principal goal is to hype metaphors of human frontiers—both physical and intellectual—in exchange for enormous sums of taxpayer money. The Apollo program, for example, was in many ways the greatest technological achievement in human history, but it was made possible by a slick, imagery-infused media campaign that sprung unlimited amounts of cash from Congress.
The Lisa Nowak fiasco was all about losing control of the myth, about NASA’s helplessness to shield her—or itself—in the face of the global media firestorm. On the morning of February 6, what hit the newswires was the pinched, frightened, supplicating, and in some very profound way, sad face of the woman who had driven nine hundred miles wearing diapers to confront her rival. The diapers, we now know, changed everything. They sparked loud, involuntary national guffaws and thousands of jokes. Headlines like “Dark Side of the Loon” and “In Space No One Can Hear You Pee” proliferated. Talk show hosts couldn’t resist the easy target. “As you know,” snickered Jay Leno, “she went to court yesterday and was released in her own incontinence.”
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