Houston, She's Got Some Problems

By Jeffrey Kluger

Give the folks at NASA this much -- they know how to close ranks. Astronaut Lisa Marie Nowak was arrested this week and charged with attempted murder after driving 900 miles from Houston to Orlando, Fla., allegedly carrying a knife, a BB gun, pepper spray, latex gloves and rubber tubing--wearing a diaper all the while so she wouldn't have to stop en route--and assaulting a romantic rival in a parking lot. After all that, NASA spokesman James Hartsfield assured the press: "Her status as an astronaut is currently unchanged." If crazy doesn't get you bumped from the flight rotation, what does? Nowak, of course, is through as an astronaut. Just as important, she's through as an icon--and she was a very good one. A 43-year-old Naval Academy graduate and married mother of three, she managed the demographic hat trick of career, motherhood and military. No buzz-cut, fists-on-hips Al Shepard or Deke Slayton was better suited to his era than Nowak was to hers.

The perfectly lurid way it all came unraveled is a tale that doesn't require much telling--not that it won't be told and told and told again by cable, tabs and blogs. The truly meaningful question is why that unraveling happened at all. Annapolis grads and shuttle jocks aren't supposed to come unglued. And NASA, a brutally Darwinian place that has been screening astronauts for almost 50 years, is not supposed to let loose screws through. Is NASA not as good at this as we thought? Are astronauts more destructible souls than they seem? And what does all this say about the weight-bearing ability of any human mind when the load grows too great? Whatever burdens Nowak was carrying, when she crashed, she crashed hard. A veteran of a single shuttle flight, she had developed what she later told police was "more than a working relationship but less than a romantic relationship" with William Oefelein, 41, a divorced astronaut who flew in space in December. Unfortunately for Nowak, Oefelein may have had a relationship of his own with Air Force Captain Colleen Shipman, single and 30. In recent weeks, Nowak separated from her husband. In the buttoned-up world of NASA, all that makes for a nasty stew.

Shipman was planning to fly into Orlando late Sunday, and apparently Nowak decided to confront her there and embarked on the long drive from Houston to Florida with the alleged cache of weapons and now much snickered-about diaper. Wearing a dark wig, glasses and a trench coat, police said, she was waiting when Shipman's flight landed after 1 a.m. on Monday, and followed her to the parking lot. After Shipman got into her car and closed the door, Nowak supposedly appeared at the window, pleading for a ride or the use of a cell phone.

"No, if you need help, I'll send someone," Shipman responded, according to her police statement. She did, however, open the window a crack, and when she did, Nowak reportedly hit her with a burst of pepper spray. Shipman drove off and asked an attendant to call the police. An officer appeared and reported seeing Nowak throw away a bag that contained the wig and BB gun.

Nowak was arrested and charged with battery and attempted kidnapping and murder. She was freed on bail but is required to wear an ankle bracelet that monitors her movements and ensures she doesn't try to re-enter Florida. She then flew home to Houston, exiting the Orlando airport in a burst of flashbulbs similar to the one she experienced last summer when she and her crewmates made the traditional march to the launchpad van. But this time she had her jacket over her head and offered no waves to the crowd.

The legal outlook for Nowak is hard to handicap. Prosecutors would probably have an easier time making the battery and kidnapping charges stick than the attempted-murder count. "What we have is a desperate woman who wants to have a conversation with the other woman," an angry defense attorney, Donald Lykkebak, argued to the judge before her release. "She doesn't shoot her. She doesn't stab her."

No matter how Nowak's legal woes are resolved, larger questions will remain. Most pressing is how a woman who could come so unhinged was deemed fit to fly as recently as last July. Astronauts undergo exhaustive psychological tests before they are accepted to the flight corps as well as annual physical and mental exams after that. Additionally, they are evaluated before, during and after missions. Even so, there's only so much that can be learned, and for someone like Nowak, who joined NASA in 1996, the 11 years between her initial assessment and the recent unpleasantness provided a lot of time in which she could have grown quietly unstable.

Much has been made of the postflight letdown astronauts experience, when a mission they anticipated for years is all at once over. This can be especially cruel in the current NASA, where too many astronauts are queuing up for too few flights aboard shuttles that will be mothballed in 2010. Astronaut Dave Scott, commander of Apollo 15, recalls coming back from the moon and later attending a neighborhood barbecue held in his honor. The discordance between the lunar surface he had recently camped on and the small-bore world he returned to left him dazed. He quickly recovered, and Nowak likely did too. "Everyone in the program knows it's coming to an end," says space historian and author William Burrows. "She's probably way too smart to succumb to that."

Playing a greater role, perhaps, is the odd world that contemporary astronauts inhabit. The first astronauts were a disciplined bunch, but they were also test pilots. That meant that--with the exception of the well-mannered John Glenn--they spent their time enjoying the good whiskey, fast cars and plentiful women befitting their celebrity status. Back then NASA called these things high jinks and looked the other way. "The country needed heroes, so a myth was created," says Burrows. "NASA didn't go public with these matters."

But today everything is public, and in the tut-tut world of expos journalism, astronauts--particularly women--misbehave at their peril. Nowak's NASA bio includes a seemingly focus-group-tested list of 10 wholesome hobbies, such as running, skeet shooting and raising African violets--pastimes somewhat at odds with a 900-mile pursuit in a wig and diapers. For now, Nowak will have time to return to those hobbies: NASA has placed her on a 30-day leave. The space agency will move beyond this episode but has already publicly resolved to keep a closer eye on--and take better care of--the astronaut colleagues Nowak leaves behind.

--With reporting by Hilary Hylton/Austin and Barbara Liston/Orlando