We can learn something about life from the Lisa Nowak story.
By Myrna Blyth
An excerpt:
In many ways, “Lisa’s Losing It” is already being played as another cautionary tale of a working mom crumpling under the stress of coping with a family—she has a teenage son and five-year-old twin daughters—and a too-demanding job. In a recent “Right Stuff” interview for Ladies’ Home Journal, Lisa, who describes herself as “competitive, determined, ambitious,” talks about trying six times to get into test pilot school. When she finally got in, she had a nine-month-old baby, which “was definitely a challenge.” A friend said about her, “[Lisa] was the epitome of managing a very hectic career, making sacrifices to accommodate her family. All these stresses can conspire to overwhelm…”
Yet her totally aberrant actions seems to me more related to the great letdown that competitive, determined, ambitious people, both men and women, can sometimes experience in the middle of their lives, especially after achieving what they always thought they wanted . Remember St. Teresa’s wise admonition that more tears are shed over answered prayers than unanswered.
Lisa finally went up in space last summer after waiting almost ten years for the chance. USA Today reported that she was sick her first few days in space, and that during the mission she was confused by the corridors of the International Space Station where the shuttle spent some time. She also said in interviews she found her job of operating the shuttle and the station’s robotic arm more difficult than in ground training. Although NASA said her performance had been “excellent,” it was likely she would never go up again. After waiting and working all those years, could there be a greater downer?
How does the almost inevitable depression after such an experience affect someone? If you no longer want what you have always wanted, what crazy thing might you think you want instead?
Of course that doesn’t fully explain or condone Lisa’s loony actions. After all, there was a four-inch knife and a steel mallet in the goody bag she was carrying to help facilitate a heart-to-heart talk with her supposed love rival. She will be in serious trouble long after her story fades from the headlines.
Even now, I know Lisa’s travails can be dismissed as part of a “tawdry love triangle,” of little importance, and only of interest to the women readers of the tabs, the women viewers of TV series and late-night comedians. But I think it has so many of us talking because it is really such a sad, and such a human, story.
Fly Me to the Moon
By John Derbyshire
Is there something peculiar to the culture of NASA that might be a causative, or at least contributing, factor here?
Well, there are things that come to mind. An astronaut-training program, like a movie set, is a place where young, fit, and bright people — and therefore mostly attractive: it’s not easy to be young, fit, bright, and repulsive — are bonded together in a common enterprise. Furthermore, the astronauts, unlike the movie stars, face great danger — 14 deaths in 117 flights so far, worse than one chance in 60 of a gruesome death far, far from any help. Danger is a terrific aphrodisiac. If the level of hanky-panky among astronauts were not way higher than it is among, oh, say, the staff of a political magazine, these would not be red-blooded American guys and gals.
Worse yet, these fired-up young athletes, the adrenalin chasing the endorphins round their circulatory systems, have not much they can do with their fired-upness. There go maximum seven career astronauts to a shuttle flight — “maximum” because there may be a “payload specialist” or two in there, and these folk are not counted as career astronauts. NASA currently has 96 career astronauts on payroll. On the optimistic assumption that the shuttle gets back up to its former five or six missions a year, say 40 career-astronaut-rides a year, there’s a lot of standing around in those numbers. (Actual numbers of flights working backwards through the past seven years, 2006-2000, were: 3, 1, 0, 1*, 5, 6, 5. That asterisk was the Columbia disaster of February 2003.) The Devil makes work for idle hands.
I must say, though, that for all the horrors I can glimpse (I think) inside Ms. Nowak’s head, and for all the sadness, all those bewildered faces of children, that must be behind the stories of her separation and Mr. Ofelein’s divorce (both of which are apparently connected to the present story), I am aware of something more than mere ghoulish curiosity when I’m reading about this case.
In a way, and with due respect to all the negatives noted above, the Nowak-Ofelein-Shipman story is reassuring. When the idea of human beings in space first passed into the realm of the possible, we all thought that the stresses and rigors involved would require Spock-like automatons. The first astronauts weren’t actually much like that, but they weren’t much like ourselves, either. They were mainly steel-nerved über-jocks, white and male and military, from country towns in states nobody ever went to.
Now here we are a generation later with an astronaut corps that not only looks like America — the faces on a NASA flight-promotional picture are as exquisitely balanced by race and sex as those you’ll see in a college prospectus — but behaves like it, too, with all the suburban angst and fortysomething dysfunction the rest of us are vexed with. These are human beings!
I am not, to put it very mildly indeed, a fan of NASA or its manned space program. If we must have a taxpayer-funded Astronaut Corp, though, I am glad to know that it is rich in the sort of material that has nourished novels, plays, poems, and songs for the past 3,000 years.
I wonder what sort of answers Ms. Nowak would give to a Dr. Laura interrogation.
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