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)
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While NASA frantically tried to field thousands of calls from reporters who wanted to know about government-issue diapers and steamy e-mails to and from outer space, the now-familiar media circus descended on Clear Lake (at least until Anna Nicole Smith’s sudden death, on February 8, propelled them over to Mexia). Satellite trucks and TV crews filled the cul-de-sac where Lisa and her family lived. Inside Edition, the Wall Street Journal, and every media outlet in between begged for interviews. FedEx deliveries from Dr. Phil arrived at the Nowak house. A few days after Lisa’s arrest, the price of an autographed photo of her on eBay hit $10,000.
For the insular and fragile NASA culture, still recovering from the shock of Columbia, this was a sort of extended nightmare. In the aftermath of the crash, there had been real psychological trauma at the agency: According to one NASA source, there were “several nervous breakdowns” and, among support personnel, one suicide. It was seen as such a serious problem that therapists were unleashed. “We have this immense loss that we can never undo,” says Paul Hill, the deputy director of mission operations for the space shuttle. “There was collective and individual counseling, and we brought in various cultural coaches and psychologist types who spent time talking to our folks and boring into our culture.” Now, in the wake of this crisis of confidence, came an apparently real case of mental illness in an astronaut who had not only flown the previous year but was to be the voice of Mission Control for the next scheduled shuttle flight. “I hate to say this,” a public affairs officer at NASA told me shortly after the incident, “but things are so bad around here it almost feels like Columbia.”
It did not help matters that Lisa’s story of love and rejection was particularly dramatic and salacious. Like most astronauts, she had a résumé that looked nearly superhuman, and it was the very flawlessness of her record that afforded the perfect setup line for the epic tale it took the media about six seconds to spin out: American hero shamed, disgraced, brought low. She was a graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy, the Naval Postgraduate School, and the Naval Test Pilot School. She was an aerospace engineer, a specialist in electronic warfare. In space, a mere seven months before, she had successfully manipulated the shuttle’s robotic arm during the crew’s space walks. And then everything came crashing to earth.
THE EVENTS THAT TOOK place in Orlando had their origins in 2004, when Lisa Nowak and Bill Oefelein began their affair. At the time, both had been married to other people for sixteen years. Lisa had a twelve-year-old son and twin three-year-old daughters. Bill had a fourteen-year-old son and a ten-year-old daughter. They were both in the Navy. Both had the rank of commander. As astronauts, they worked and trained together in the cloistered world inside the Johnson Space Center, in Houston, sharing desk space on the sixth floor of an office building. They once spent eleven days together in Canada doing cold-weather survival training.
Their home lives, meanwhile, deteriorated. Bill’s wife, Michaella, a striking redhead, divorced him in 2005. Lisa and her husband, Richard, separated, intending to divorce, in early 2007. Once Bill was single, he moved to an apartment and gave Lisa a key. They spent time together at work and at play: They were on the same cycling team and trained together for races. From all available evidence, it was an intense, sexual, and highly secretive love affair.
The trouble started in November 2006, when Bill met Colleen Shipman during a training mission at the Kennedy Space Center, in Florida. Colleen, who worked for the Air Force testing hardware for spaceflights, was attractive, petite, full of energy, and well liked by her neighbors, who called her the Little General. She had graduated from Penn State University in 2002 with degrees in German and chemical engineering. In spite of the distance between them, they traveled to see each other on weekends and quickly fell in love. When Bill flew his December shuttle mission, she sent him an e-mail in outer space with a subject line that read: “I need a rubdown.” The message itself said: “Will have to control myself when I see you. First urge will be to rip your clothes off, throw you on the ground and love the hell out of you.” Back on earth, his e-mails to her tended to be sedate, as in, “I need to see you. I am having Colleen withdrawals. Must see Colleen.” She was less restrained: “Lots of love coming your way . . . and kisses and a great big giant hug with my legs around you.”
Bill insisted to Colleen that he had ended his affair with Lisa, whom she had never met. “When he told me he had this relationship and that he broke it off with her,” Colleen later told the Orlando police, “I asked him, ‘Are you sure that she’s okay with this? Because you know how these things go.’ And I said, ‘Is there gonna be some crazy lady showing up at my door trying to kill me?’ And he said, ‘No, no, no, she’s not like that. She’s fine with it. She’s happy for me.’” In fact, it was January before Bill finally brought himself to tell Lisa that his feelings for her had changed. “I told her that I had met Colleen and I had fallen in love and I was wanting to pursue an exclusive relationship with Colleen,” he told the Orlando police. According to people who know her, Lisa’s reaction was purely in character: controlled, unemotional. “She seemed a little disappointed, but she seemed to be accepting of that” was how Bill put it. Still, she persisted in phoning him every day even though, Bill said, he “wasn’t always receptive to the phone call.” Her messages were “nice and, you know, extremely friendly and not adversarial,” he explained, “just indicative of the type of person she is.” He had come to believe that he and Lisa could coexist as good friends. They continued to plan training rides with their bicycle club and flights together in the T-38 jets in which all astronauts must log a certain minimum number of flying hours (he would be in the front seat flying the plane, she in the back; contrary to media reports, she is not a test pilot nor any kind of pilot).
Lisa, of course, had not accepted any of this. That same month, she had split with her husband. She was more deeply in love with Bill than ever and believed her future was with him. In some of the accounts that followed her arrest, there was speculation as to why she’d “snapped.” But snapping hardly describes what she did after Bill broke up with her, which was to carefully and even obsessively plan, over a period of at least three weeks, her confrontation with Colleen, all the while preparing for her job as the “capcom” (capsule communicator)—the voice of Mission Control—for the next shuttle mission, at the time scheduled to launch in March of this year but since postponed to June.
Using her key to Bill’s apartment, she had broken into his computer and found Colleen’s travel itinerary for a visit to Houston from February 1 to February 4. She also found those steamy e-mails. She concocted a plan: She would drive to Orlando, where Colleen was landing at 1 a.m. on February 5 after her trip to Houston. She would confront her. She printed out maps of her driving route, the Orlando airport, and the neighborhood in Cape Canaveral where Colleen lived. She made obsessively detailed, handwritten lists of the things she would bring: plastic gloves, glasses, makeup, sneakers (black, size 8-9), black sweats, a sharp knife, a gun, binoculars, a baseball cap, and food, water, and a cooler for the car. On February 3 she set off, wearing a special space diaper known as a mag (shorthand for “maximum absorption garment”), which astronauts use when they have to be in space suits for an extended period of time, such as on the launchpad. Lisa later told the police she wore them to avoid having to take bathroom breaks. By the time she arrived in Orlando, after stopping for the night in DeFuniak Springs, Florida, and registering at the hotel as “Linda Turner,” she had used two of them.
Colleen, meanwhile, was having something of an odd weekend with Bill in Houston. For one thing, she had discovered Lisa’s bike in his apartment, which had angered her. She had confronted him about it and made him promise to get rid of it. “It made me very uncomfortable,” she later said. “It made me want to pull away from this relationship … because it made me think that he didn’t quite cut his ties, maybe.” Something else caused her to be even more suspicious. While the two were lying in bed, after dinner and drinks and a night out, Bill had called her Lisa.
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