Fly Me To The Moon

The news that at 9.00 a.m. on 21 October 2008, at Daytona Beach, the case of fallen astronaut, Lisa Marie Nowak, is finally to be heard has been a long time coming. Whether you view Nowak as a cold, calculating figure reduced to ridicule for her diaper –wearing antics, or as a decent, upstanding achiever, driven to the point of desperation by mental duress, there can be no doubt the case is an interesting one.

How you view Nowak depends, to an extent, on how you view astronauts. Lisa Nowak was selected by NASA in April 1996 after a prestigious military career in the US Navy. She claims to have wanted to be an astronaut from the age of 6. There are undoubtedly many people who were of an impressionable age at the time of the first lunar landing who thought, ‘I want to be an astronaut one day” but not that many who actually jumped the hurdles, pursued the dream and underwent the necessary rigours to make that thought real.

That Lisa Nowak’s name is more often than not associated with the image of a woman in her forties wearing, and despoiling, diapers as she dashes madly across 950 miles of American soil to confront a younger woman, whom she considers a love rival, does not do justice to the woman. Nowak’s numerous and laudatory accomplishments and her service to her country have become subsumed within a miasma of dark, prurient humour, finger wagging and an almost gloating delight at how the mighty can fall.

The baffling series of events which landed Nowak in police custody on 5 February 2007 have been well documented. The legal case has captured an enormous amount of public attention and comment. Nowak’s situation has been a subject of ridicule on popular platforms; a pastiche, misused for laughs. Fun was made of her diaper- wearing antics on the TV show Jim Rome is burning, the VH1 2007 show Best Year Ever’ (www.wikipedia.org) also drew laughs at her expense as did Britain’s 2007 Big Fat Quiz of the Year (www.wikipedia.org) and MAD magazine listed her at number 8 on its 2007 ‘Top 20 dumbest people, events, and things’, despite the obvious fact that Nowak is not ‘dumb’. In the flurry of curiosity piqued and maudlin musings there have, however, been very real emotional and practical costs. For one thing, Lisa Nowak is no longer an astronaut.

On February 4, 2007 Lisa Nowak, then 43, drove from Houston, Texas, to Orlando, Florida, to wait for 30 year old Colleen Shipman’s flight to land at Orlando International Airport from Houston. Nowak then followed Shipman to her car in the airport car park. Shipman, aware she had been followed onto and off the shuttle bus and that the same woman, Nowak in disguise, was following her to her car was able to run to the car, get in and lock the car to prevent Nowak gaining access to it. Nowak slapped the car, grabbed at the car door, fabricated a story about needing a lift and then used tears to get Shipman to lower the window sufficiently for Nowak to pepper spray her face. Shipman was able to drive to the car park booth for assistance and Orlando Police Department was alerted. Nowak was spotted throwing a bag into the trash as she attempted to make good her escape and was arrested when identified by Shipman. Nowak claims she intended talking to Shipman and maybe scaring her some.

Nowak was arrested at the airport and charged with attempted kidnapping, battery, attempted vehicle burglary with battery and destruction of evidence. Perusal of the contents of the bag Nowak disposed of, and evidence found in Nowak’s car at a nearby motel, were, however, sufficient to give Orlando Police sufficient cause to believe that Nowak’s intentions were a whole lot more sinister and they later charged her with attempted first degree murder. Nowak’s lawyer, Donald Lykkebak, successfully argued that the judge should not find probable cause for the attempted murder charge because it was based on the same incident as the original charges (http://cnn.usnews.com). In the end, Florida prosecutors opted not to pursue an attempted murder charge. On 2 March, Florida prosecutors filed three formal charges against Nowak: attempted kidnapping with intent to inflict bodily harm or terrorise, burglary of a conveyance with a weapon and battery. On 30 March Nowak entered a plea of not guilty in relation to the kidnapping charges and her attorney requested a jury trial. The trial was postponed from 30 July 2007 to 7 April 2008, so that the prosecution could prepare. The trial and the proposed pre-trial of 12 March were postponed indefinitely on 16 January 2008, pending the state’s appeal of a decision taken in November 2007 by circuit judge Marc Lubet not to use either the evidence found in Nowak’s car on the day of her arrest or the statements she made on her arrest. Lubet ruled that Detective William Becton of the Orlando Police had not adequately advised Nowak of her constitutional rights after her arrest and had not properly obtained permission to search her vehicle (www.orlandosentinel.com).

Nowak’s mental health is at the centre of everything. Her state of mind at the time of her arrest was clearly not at its most stable (www.wsws.org) and a swipe or two was taken at NASA’s psychological screening process and whether or not it sufficiently monitors astronauts after they have experienced outer space. It seems to me that the ‘common man’ belittles him or herself by being so keen to point fingers, to get pleasure out of dragging down those seen as rarefied and privileged. The fact that astronauts are made much of is not so much because they look groovy and otherworldly in their spacesuits and go to places ‘no man has been before’, but rather because they personify the whole notion of mankind’s perpetual quest to reach the top of the pinnacle, to seek answers and to strive for the unknowable. Without those men and women willing and able to step into frontiers unknown there would be no progress. Man has been attempting to build ‘Towers of Babel’ for time immemorial; it is what has made us the dominant species on this planet. And space research may one day make us the dominant species beyond.

Nowak’s parents issued a statement in the aftermath of their daughter’s arrest in which they claimed her behaviour had been “completely out of character” (www.chron.com). Nowak’s legal team have decided to use an insanity defence which doesn’t challenge her competence to stand trial but raises insanity at the time of the offense, based on psychiatric diagnosis indicating Obsessive-Compulsive (Personality) Disorder, partner relational problem, major depressive disorder (single episode), insomnia, brief psychotic disorder with marked stressors and Asperger’s Disorder, problems with primary support group (marital separation and inability to confide in members of family of origin), and problems related to social environment.

Nowak’s family are quoted as saying, “Considering both her personal and professional life, these alleged events are completely out of character…” (http://cnn.usnews.com). It’s interesting that Nowak’s family juxtapose Nowak’s personal and professional life against her behaviour regarding Shipman. But was her behaviour really ‘out of character’? Could it not be that the same drive and determination that saw Nowak take her childhood dream and turn it into reality were the very same character traits that drove her in an altogether different pursuit of a more tangible target and that Shipman was merely an obstacle to be dealt with in order to achieve that target; namely to keep William Oefelein all to herself?

Could it not be that the psychological make-up which served her so well in gaining all those academic credentials, and which helped propel her inexorably upwards in her military and NASA careers, was destabilised by the treatment meted out to her by Oefelein? After all, it can’t have been natural or easy for a woman whose whole life had been held up as the epitome of all things good and wholesome and salutary to be conducting a long term clandestine affair. It must have been galling indeed to have a younger woman try to pip you at the post just as the way seemed clear to formalising her liaison with Oefelein. Oefelein’s seventeen year marriage had culminated in divorce in 2005, an event in which Oefelein’s mother-in-law, Charlene Davis (www.foxnews.com), claims Nowak had a hand and, by all accounts, Nowak’s own marriage was crumbling by November of 2006. Nowak is now separated from her husband.

Nowak discovered e-mails between Oefelein and Shipman which strongly suggested a relationship which had materialised at the back end of 2007 was gaining momentum fast. Not one to be ushered into the loser slot, Nowak began employing all the efficiency and precision of her mental machinery to outwit Shipman. But her thinking had become flawed, she’d lost track of reality and for that doesn’t Oefelein bear some sort of blame? You cannot meddle with peoples’ emotions, be parsimonious with the truth to a lover, and not expect possible fallout. The loss of her friend, Laurel Clark, in the 2003 ‘Columbia’ shuttle disaster, the pressure of representing the astronaut image, heroic and courageous and almost superhuman, the pressure of conducting an affair and losing, in silent stages, the security of a good marriage, the awareness that her family life could crumble, the headiness of being selected to go into space on 4 July 2006, spending 13 days in space and then returning to humdrum old Earth, the knowledge that she was now in her forties and unlikely to go into space again, the simple awareness of age and all the self-doubt that that entails all made Nowak vulnerable. Oefelein’s betrayal may just have been the final straw, enough to topple Nowak into the chaos that subsequently ensued.

According to prosecutor Amanda Cowan, Lisa Nowak “…had a mission that she was very determined to carry out” (www.washingtonpost.com); it was a mission faulty at inception. On 21 October 2008, Lisa Nowak will face the consequences for embarking on her latest mission but it is to be hoped that all the other missions she has embarked on during the course of a life successfully served aiming for, and reaching, the stars will cushion her fall from grace.

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