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.
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Colleen landed in Orlando shortly after 1 a.m. She learned that her bags would not arrive for nearly two and a half hours, so she decided to wait. There is a certain Warner Bros. cartoon aspect to what happened next. Unbeknownst to her, Lisa (who had never met her but knew what she looked like from a photograph Bill had) was there, surveilling her, wearing a hooded trench coat, round-rimmed red glasses, rolled-up blue jeans, black sneakers, and a black wig. There were very few people in the airport. At roughly 3:30, Colleen boarded an empty parking lot shuttle bus. Lisa followed, dressed so outlandishly that Colleen couldn’t help staring at her, then got off at Colleen’s stop and, as Colleen was getting into her car, came running across the parking lot. She tried to open the car door, then slapped at the window. “Can you help me, please?” she said. “My boyfriend was supposed to pick me up and he is not here. I’ve been traveling and it’s late. Can you give me a ride to the parking office?” Colleen replied, “No. If you need help, I’ll send someone to help you.” Lisa then asked to use her cell phone. When Colleen told her the battery was dead, Lisa said she could not hear her and started crying, so Colleen opened her window two inches. That was when Lisa sprayed her with pepper spray. “You bitch!” said Colleen, who then quickly drove away.
A few minutes later the police arrested Lisa, who was spotted trying to throw away a bag containing a loaded BB gun (which looked like a 9mm semiautomatic) and the wig; she was carrying another bag, containing the steel mallet and a four-inch buck knife. When asked what she’d planned to do with the weapons, Lisa said that she had not intended to hurt Colleen but wanted only to scare her into talking. If Colleen had refused, she’d planned to use the BB gun to force her to talk. She offered no explanation for the knife, the hammer, the rubber tubing, or the plastic gloves. Police also found bondage photos and drawings on a computer disk in her car, including images of a nude woman. Police said it was not clear who the woman was.
Later that day, Lisa was charged with attempted murder, attempted kidnapping, attempted burglary, battery, and destruction of evidence. No astronaut had ever been arrested before, let alone charged with felonies. At the time they added the attempted murder charge (which has since been dropped), the police made mention of “the detailed planning by Mrs. Nowak … the fact that she wore a disguise, her prolonged surveillance of the victim, the fact that Mrs. Nowak passed up numerous opportunities to contact the victim.” She was released on $25,500 bail, fitted with an ankle bracelet with a GPS device (so that any attempt to reenter the state of Florida would be detected), and led with her head covered to a hotel so that the media could not photograph her. The next day a car met her plane on the tarmac at Houston’s George Bush Intercontinental Airport and deposited her at the neat, 3,100-square-foot $291,000 home northeast of NASA that she had once shared with a happy family. From there, joined by her parents, she peered out as the media storm gathered around her.
On March 7 NASA informed her that it would no longer employ her as an astronaut. “I called her last week, and she sounded pretty depressed to me,” shuttle pilot Mark Kelly, her crewmate on STS-121, told me three weeks after her arrest. “We are going to try to get together with her this week. She has nothing to do. She just sits in her house all day, every day.” She still officially works for the Navy, and it will ultimately decide what to do with her. “When NASA sent her the letter saying that it no longer needed her services,” Kelly said, “they were basically saying to the Navy, ‘Over to you.’ I imagine the Navy is just going to retire her, and then she is going to be unemployable, I would think, unless she can convince someone that she is fixed.”
In April she reported to the staff of the chief of Naval Air Training Command in Corpus Christi, where she is helping to develop training programs. Navy officials have said they will defer action against her (for, among other things, fraternizing with fellow officers) until after her criminal trial this September in Orlando.
IN THE FALL OF 2005, while I was working on another story, NASA gave me clearance to participate in an extraordinary piece of astronaut training: a shuttle maneuver known as a de-orbit burn. It involved strapping myself into a crew seat on the flight deck of the shuttle’s mission simulator and watching as the crew flipped the craft so that it flew upside down and backward, fired the twin orbital maneuvering system engines, and slowed the orbiter from 17,500 miles per hour to about 17,300—enough to cause it to fall out of orbit and reenter the earth’s atmosphere. The simulator replicates every detail and system of the real shuttle. In front of me were the pilot and commander; above them were projection screens in the windows that showed realistic images of earth and space. The crew belonged to mission number STS-121, which would eventually fly Discovery on July 4, 2006. The person seated next to me was mission specialist Lisa Nowak.
I was observing a small piece of her workweek: In flight training she would spend 50 or 55 hours a week in class and in various simulators (and another 15 doing administrative and other chores). She seemed intense, focused, not at all relaxed, and not entirely thrilled that a journalist was sitting next to her. People have described her as shy, and she did seem that way, though she shared in the casual jocularity of the crew. Mostly, she struck me—with her hair pulled back into a tight ponytail, makeup-less and relatively cheerless—as all business. Maybe that was because the essence of simulator training is crisis. Instructors in another room deliberately create problems, usually in rapid sequence, and the crew has to figure out how to solve them. Sometimes these problems are unintentionally fatal, and the crew is “killed.” Sometimes they require small, simple solutions like flipping a switch or shutting down a pump.
On this day the instructors were throwing a string of power failures at the crew as it executed the de-orbit burn and reentry: first a minor one, then a larger one that caused the cockpit lights, among other systems, to go out. The way the astronauts solve these problems is strikingly low-tech: They all have checklists (bound stacks of paper with procedures for solving problems) and pencils, and the two mission specialists have knee boards to write on. As the crisis worsened, Lisa flipped furiously through her checklists, sometimes scribbling with her pencil and speaking a few clipped words to Commander Steve Lindsey. This went on for two hours, until we watched the coastline of the United States float up in the simulator’s windows and we “landed” in Florida. The de-orbit training was followed by a less intense but still quite serious debriefing with the instructors, who told them what they did right and wrong. As far as I could tell, they got most of it right. It occurred to me, when it was all over, that along the way we had duplicated all but the last few minutes of Columbia, which began its de-orbit burn at 8:15 a.m. on February 1, 2003, felt the first heat of reentry at 8:44, and disintegrated over Texas at 9:00, an event the crew was fully conscious of for about a minute.
The mission simulators in which Lisa and her crew were training had been built in the seventies, which tells you a good deal—though by no means all—about what is wrong with the shuttle program. It should be obvious to even casual observers that the program is stuck in the distant past. It is basically unchanged since the first shuttle flew, in 1981. The launch technology is almost exactly the same, the training of the astronauts is almost exactly the same, and the destination is always exactly the same: low earth orbit, something both Americans and Russians were able to do by the early sixties. “We are no longer living in anything resembling what we thought would be the Space Age,” Greg Klerkx wrote in Lost in Space: The Fall of NASA and the Dream of a New Space Age, his 2004 book. “There are no passenger spacecraft, no orbiting platforms for business or pleasure. There is no human spaceflight at all that anyone would call ordinary. No one has returned to the moon; no human has gone to Mars.” This is not all the agency’s fault. As the Columbia Accident Investigation Board put it, it is also the result of “the lack, over the past three decades, of any national mandate providing NASA a compelling mission requiring human presence in space.”
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