Chrissy Williams
Within three months, two internal affairs at NASA have embarrassed the department and shocked the nation, launching the question:
What’s up with NASA?
These astronauts are nuts!
If you haven’t heard the story of Lisa Nowak, drop your jaw and raise your eyebrows now.
It’s Feb. 5, 2007, and Nowak is driving fast on a long stretch of freeway.
She is wearing sunglasses, a trench coat and a wig, and under her pants, she’s wearing Depends.
“No time to stop to urinate,” she would later explain.
She had a plane – no… a woman on a plane – to catch, and had been driving nonstop for nearly 14 hours from Houston, Texas to the Orlando International Airport.
Although Nowak is married with three children, she had what could be sarcastically called “a minor crush” on fellow astronaut Bill Oefelein.
It was more like a psychotic obsession, but someone got in the way of their affection: Colleen Shipman.
Nowak arrived at the airport around midnight and waited for Shipman’s plane to land.
In the parking garage, Shipman heard footsteps behind her and ran to her car, locking the door behind her. Nowak knocked on the window and started to cry, asking to use Shipman’s cell phone.
When Shipman slightly lowered the window, Lisa pepper sprayed her.
Shipman drove away and called the police.
It was 3:50 a.m., and when the police arrive they found Nowak dumping things into a trash can…
Harmless things like black gloves, a steel mallet, rubber tubing, trash bags and a Gerber folding knife with an eight-inch blade.
“I only wanted to scare her,” Nowak told the police.
Uh-huh.
Nowak is currently wearing a GPS tracking device and is charged with attempted murder, attempted kidnapping and battery. Her trial is scheduled for Sept. 24, 2007.
Although this was definitely the most absurd incident, at least it reaped no serious consequence.
Not even three months later, on April 20, NASA got bloody.
Meet William Phillips, an engineer for the Johnson Space Center in Houston.
Phillips received an “average” job review on Thursday, so on Saturday he brought a gun to work and killed his supervisor, David Beverly.
After killing Beverly, he barricaded himself in a control room with a female hostage he taped to a chair.
Then he killed himself.
The vice president of space center said Phillips “was considered a solid performer, until recently.”
These two strange events occurring so close to each other may be coincidence.
Phillips went on his rampage only five days after the Virginia Tech shootings… Maybe it triggered something in him.
Or perhaps the problem is in NASA.
Are those anti-gravity training rooms affecting astronaut’s brains?
Has that spinning light-speed-simulation machine been approved as safe?
Maybe the planets are out of alignment.
It could even be aliens.
Whatever the reason, somebody needs to screen these space cadets more extensively: these days, you never know when you’re going to find an astro-nut.
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