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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THE PROFESSIONAL WORLD of Lisa Nowak, then, was anything but ordinary or complacent. She was in the middle of one of the most deeply goal-oriented phases of NASA’s history, reminiscent in some ways of the Apollo era. Because the Columbia crash threatened the core of the agency’s being—manned spaceflight—it had to get back into space as quickly as possible, and it had to do it safely. One more accident would likely be the end of everything.
It is impossible to know, as long as Lisa refuses to talk about it, how much this great organizational and technological swirl affected her. But it is clear that her crew was well aware that it was in an extremely unusual and dangerous situation—not only from the scathing CAIB report but also from the stark fact that the foam collision on STS-114 almost duplicated what had happened on the ill-fated Columbia. Mission pilot Kelly downplays his own concern but acknowledges that “you could argue there was a bit more risk because of the redesign to the tank. You could say, ‘Well, we don’t know certain things, like how these ice frost ramps are going to perform aerodynamically. We’re looking at more risk there.’ And some of our EVAs [extravehicular activities, or space walks] were considered high risk on the end of that boom, not knowing what it is going to do. They could have broken off and hit something, and it could have been a big mess.” The person controlling that boom was Lisa. It was her risk too.
What we do know about Lisa is that she was trying to do what few people—fourteen, according to one estimate—have ever done, which is to balance motherhood and a career as an astronaut. In an interview with Ladies’ Home Journal in 2006, she explained that she had arrived for the first day of Test Pilot School in 1992 “with a 9-month-old baby … Along the way, when I was going through all the baby training and all that, even my mother was questioning it: ‘How are you gonna be able to do all these things?’ Well, I don’t know, I’ll find out as I go.” In 2001, when her son, Alexander, was nine, she gave birth to twin girls, Alyssa and Katrina. Her husband worked in Mission Control; somehow they balanced things. They gave occasional parties, including big Easter brunches. One of her friends describes her as “a sincere person, a person you like to be around and who is easy to know. She liked entertaining. If you went over to her house and did not know she was an astronaut, you would never know it. She didn’t wear it on her sleeve.” She had hobbies other than bicycling, including growing African violets and collecting rubber stamps.
Back then, Lisa, who had joined the astronaut corps in 1996 but not been assigned to a mission yet, worked in various capacities in the space program. She served as a capcom with the orbiting space station. She worked in robotics and in administrative jobs. Most unassigned astronauts work a challenging but by no means overwhelming week, maybe fifty hours. Even in those days, however, there were things that complicated her life. In 2002 Richard was deployed overseas. Someone who remembers encountering Lisa at church at the time says: “After 9/11 I saw her. Her husband had been called up, and she was stranded at home with two babies and a little boy. That must have been really hard. I don’t know how NASA handled that with her training.”
And then, in 2003, she lost three of her classmates and friends on Columbia, including a particularly close friend, Laurel Clark. In the immediate aftermath of the crash, Lisa was assigned to the Clark family as a casualty assistance officer. “She did everything,” says Laurel’s husband, Jonathan Clark, a former NASA flight surgeon. “She went through everything: Navy paperwork, finances, bills, bank accounts. She took care of Iain [Laurel and Jonathan’s son] during the months afterward. She saw what it was like to lose one of her best friends and for Iain to lose a mother. And the thing is, while Lisa is doing this, she is not at home with her kids. She has two very young children, but she is here twelve to fourteen hours a day under the most difficult circumstances. I have to think it was hugely stressful.”
There was something else that had to worry her: After seven years as an astronaut, Lisa still had not flown in space. (She had been briefly assigned in 2002, but the flight was canceled after the Columbia crash.) “Quite a few members of Lisa’s class were being chosen for space assignments,” says Colonel Buzz Aldrin, the second man to walk on the moon. “She kept missing those assignments. To be selected as an astronaut and then to sit back and not be selected for space becomes very frustrating.”
In 2004, however, everything changed. Lisa was assigned as a mission specialist to the crew of STS-121. Suddenly her workweek was more like seventy hours. In addition to her job, she had to take care of her twin toddlers and her adolescent son. It was more work than could reasonably be done by a person getting a good night’s sleep. “I tell young girls that the best jobs in the world are being an astronaut and being a mother,” says Eileen Collins. “But it is not always easy. The difference is, for a woman, the husband usually works, so you end up doing all the work at home. I will tell you that sometimes I went on two or three hours of sleep. I don’t like to push that or brag about that, because it could be unsafe. If I am going to fly, I’m going to make sure I get more sleep. But sometimes I just had to stay up because the job didn’t get done. When do you answer your e-mail? You do it at home, because you have no time at work.”
Jonathan Clark agrees that his wife sometimes faced crushing pressures. “It’s almost incomprehensible how much stress there is,” he says. “First, there’s the fact that you’re doing a high-profile job that requires a lot of travel. There are eighty-hour weeks. And it’s different for a woman. She takes care of the kids differently than a man. Most men are just not around, but she does not have that option. My perspective is that it puts immense stress on a marriage. For us it certainly did. The only way you cope with it is through incredible tolerance and flexibility.”
Assume that Lisa was under all these pressures; now add the emotional strain of a full-blown love affair with a fellow astronaut. Perhaps that’s what caused her breakdown and her delusional attempt to scare her rival, but it’s impossible to know. Nor is it possible to know how long she had suffered from what would seem to outsiders like extreme instability or mental illness. What is certain is that she did not open up to anyone at NASA—which is not surprising, as secrecy is deeply ingrained in the agency’s astronaut/pilot culture. After her arrest, the various media wondered aloud how her employer could have possibly missed such a deep emotional problem. The fact is that astronauts—who compete intensely for limited spots on the few remaining shuttle missions—will go to extraordinary lengths to thwart any process that might keep them from flying. “The whole pilot mentality is to hide these things because, generally speaking, you can’t benefit from a medical condition,” says Patricia Santy, a psychiatrist and former NASA flight surgeon who now teaches at the University of Michigan. “A visit to the doctor for an annual physical is fraught with all sorts of potential problems. Now multiply that anxiety times ten in talking to a psychologist or psychiatrist, because here is something that there is no objective measurement for. It’s not even a lab test they can show you—just some guy’s word that you are acting strangely.” Indeed, there is an old saying at NASA: Every astronaut dreams of strangling the very last flight surgeon with the entrails of the very last space psychologist.
The most eloquent investigation of astronaut mental illness was Aldrin’s book Return to Earth, which chronicles his depression, excessive drinking, and destructive extramarital love affair after his return from the moon. As Aldrin tells it, he suddenly found himself sinking into what he calls “a morass of despair.” He became nearly dysfunctional, crying often and sometimes unable even to complete “a coherent sentence.” Like other astronauts, he concealed his problem, hiding it for a time under the rubric of “family counseling.” Aldrin believes his struggles stemmed, in part, from his adventure in space. “My life was highly structured,” he wrote. “There had always existed a major goal of one sort or another … What possible goal could I add now? There simply wasn’t one, and without a goal I was like an inert ping-pong ball being batted about by the whims and motivations of others.”
We will never know if Lisa experienced the dark side of the return from space that Aldrin describes unless she tells us, and for now she is silent. She has practical, immediate problems that won’t be solved by subjecting herself to street-corner space psychology. She will soon stand trial on charges of attempted kidnapping with intent to inflict bodily harm, burglary with a weapon, and battery (she has pleaded not guilty). Later, she will almost certainly face some form of disciplinary action from the military. Her personal and professional lives are in ruins. She is out of a job, separated from her husband, estranged from her lover, and stuck in a cul-de-sac in Clear Lake, wondering, no doubt, what became of the happier and more hopeful world she saw spinning luminously from the windows of Discovery.
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