astro-nuts

Today was one of those pleasant days in the news where all the misery of the planet is pushed aside for a particularly bizarre story. The astronaut love triangle that has resulted in kidnapping and attempted murder charges for a recent astronaut is the stuff of a saturday night live skit, not the real world. I don't particularly care about the details, what I care about is making sure people keep this incident and the state of the overall astronaut corps separate. Lisa Nowak is clearly a troubled person, but her actions are not indicative of some kind of pervasive rot within the astronaut corps or the culture of NASA. Astronauts are a culturally diverse, highly educated, and extraordinarily brave group of people, but they are also human beings and even the best of us blow a gasket from time to time. Does NASA need to review some of it's psychological testing procedures for astronauts? Absolutely. But the idea that the astronaut corps is an unstable powder keg of psychos is just wrong. Unfortunately, this incident will likely be used as a broad brush to paint the astronaut corps as a mental pressure cooker and NASA as a failed manager of it's most visible employees. We've been spared the awful news of the world for a day, let's get back to worrying about the truly crazy people out there.