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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 tubingwearing a diaper all the while so she wouldn't have to stop en routeand 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 iconand 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 tellingnot 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"
