The police in Orlando, Fla., filed attempted murder charges today against Capt. Lisa Marie Nowak, a NASA astronaut who the authorities say attacked a rival for another astronaut’s affection at Orlando International Airport on Monday after driving more than 900 miles from Houston to meet her flight.My immediate response: these people have to be pretty damn bright to become astronauts and get through training, so how exactly does she plan to get away with any scheme that involves a mallet (?), knife, BB gun (?!?) and some form of kidnapping? If it's too implausible for CSI or Law and Order, it just won't work in real life. You could strongly suggest she doesn't have....the Right Stuff (oh-oh oh-oh-oh, oh-oh oh-oh).
Captain Nowak, a Navy captain who flew on a shuttle mission last summer, was originally arrested on attempted kidnapping and other charges, and a judge initially set a $15,500 bond at a court session this morning.
But this afternoon, the police filed the new charges against her, saying they had evidence that Captain Nowak intended ”to do serious bodily injury or death” to Colleen Shipman, a captain in the Air Force, because she considered Captain Shipman to be a rival in her romance with a fellow NASA astronaut, Cmdr. Bill Oefelein.
When the police arrested Captain Nowak, they found in her possession a steel mallet, a buck knife with a four-inch blade, a BB gun and a map to Captain Shipman’s house, they said.
More seriously for all space travel/satellites, but particularly those with live people on board, is the sheer amount of crap flying around out in space. Most of it is small, but it pack quite a wallop when it hits you at 21,000 miles per hour. Thanks to the Chinese shooting down a satellite to test out their abilities, there are now 1 thousand new piece of large debris to go along with the 7,000 old ones (<- cool NYTimes interactive graphic!). According to a colloquium I heard last year, there is virtually nothing that can be done to get rid of them, and thanks to all the new debris, we're going to eventually get to a point where we get a chain reaction as pieces of debris hit other pieces, creating even more debris. Beyond all the problems with keeping people alive in space in a sustainable way, we simply have no way to deal with simple tasks like taking out the trash. It's a serious problem, and it's getting worse. Perhaps we should spend a bit less time trying to get to Mars, and a bit more making our current home planet a bit more livable, by making sure it doesn't get so warm that we flood all our coastal cities and kill off a big chunk of the biosphere. Just saying.
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hey you're the one who wants to move back to the Northeast..... Its nice and safe here in the Midwest. All we have to deal with are increasing droughts, increasing severity of storm systems, and scary Christians.
on a positive note, the US seems to be leading the way still in the shooting crap into outer space department, despite recent efforts by China. USA! USA! USA!
This astronaut madness is big news even here! I was thinking about why this is such an attractive news story and I think it's because, as you allude to, "smart" people aren't supposed to behave in trashy ways. I think it's because this astronaut has transgressed some socioeconomic class boundary in her behavior that it's big news. But this proves that even smart people go over the edge sometimes. Actually there was plenty of proof of that already, but usually it's antisocial behavior on the part of mathematicians. :-)
The one rule for the news: it's not really the number of dead, nor how important the case, but rather the salaciousness of the headline that makes a story "news".
On another note, Megan's comment brings up a point that a former roommate and I used to discuss. The number of crazy people in the world is staggering, just absolutely staggering. It has little to do with intelligence, race, or religion (scary christians exempted, of course). There are crazy doctors, lawyers, retail workers, etc., and even astronauts apparently. People, speaking generally, are very often frakkin' nuts.
For every sane person you meet, there's a crazy freak out there. Besides I honestly think the NASA psycho stalker is funnier than s**t.
I mean. Dude! The entire scenario reads like a CSI plot line. Its inane. I thought you had to be brilliant to be an astronaut. 2 squirrels and a hedgehog could come up with a better murder plan.
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