Where have you gone, Alan Shepherd? A nation turns its lonely eyes to you

I was just saying to a friend a few hours ago that when I see NASA astronaut teams consisting of a bureaucratically designed diversity of males and females and different races and nationalities, it kills any interest I might have had in the space program. This is not space exploration: this is PC in space.

Also, the idea that women should be integrated with men in such tight quarters is wrong, just as it is wrong to have women integrated with men on Navy ships and in military units generally, a practice that has had the effect of sexualizing the military (including widespread promiscuity among military personnel and the production of lots and lots of illegitimate children that are then supported by the U.S. military), and injecting a host of female concerns and “issues”—including sexual jealousy—into a serious male domain that simply do not belong there.

That was all build-up to this unbelievable story, which I will quote in full without further comment:

Space shuttle astronaut arrested at OIA on attempted kidnapping, battery charges
Henry Pierson Curtis Sentinel Staff Writer

A NASA astronaut is charged with attacking her rival for another astronaut’s attention early Monday at Orlando International Airport, the Orlando Sentinel has learned.

Lisa Marie Nowak drove from Texas to meet the 1 a.m. flight of a younger woman who had also been seeing the male astronaut Nowak pined for, according to Orlando police.

Nowak—who was a mission specialist on a Discovery launch last summer—was wearing a trench coat and wig and had a knife, BB pistol, rubber tubing and plastic bags, reports show. Once U.S. Air Force Capt. Colleen Shipman arrived, Nowak followed her to the airport’s Blue Lot for long-term parking, tried to get into Shipman’s car and doused her with pepper spray, according to reports.

Nowak, 43, is charged with attempted kidnapping, battery, attempted vehicle burglary with battery and destruction of evidence. Police considered her such a danger that they requested she be held without bail in the Orange County Jail, reports show.

Nowak told police that she was “involved in a relationship with,” Bill Oefelein another NASA astronaut, and categorized the relationship as “more than a working relationship but less than a romantic relationship,” according to the charging affidavit.

Nowak told police that she found out Oefelein was involved with Shipman and planned a trip to Orlando to talk to Shipman about their relationships with Oefelein. She told police the BB gun “was going to be used to entice Ms. Shipman to talk with her,” the affidavit said.

Shipman told police that when she arrived at the airport and was waiting for the airport satellite parking shuttle, she noticed a woman wearing a trench coat near the taxi stand. The woman boarded the bus after Shipman, according to police, and followed her to Shipman’s car.

When Shipman got into her car, reports show, she heard “running footsteps” coming toward her. Nowak tried to open the car door, then claimed she needed a ride, or use of a cell phone. When Shipman rolled down her window a couple of inches, Nowak “sprayed some type of chemical spray into the vehicle,” reports show.

Shipman is an engineer assigned to the 45th Launch Support Squadron at Patrick Air Force base, near the Kennedy Space Center. A 2002 graduate of Penn State University, she began working at Cape Canaveral in May, 2005, according to air base Public Affairs Officer Ken Warren.

Police said that along with the weapons and other items in Nowak’s car, they found e-mails from Shipman to Oefelein, Mapquest directions from Houston to the Orlando airport, and diapers, which Nowak told police she used so she wouldn’t have to stop on the drive.

Monday’s arrest is the first-ever on felony charges for an active-duty astronaut, that the space agency was aware of, according to a spokesman.

“Her status as an astronaut with NASA is currently unchanged. I cannot speculate on what might happen beyond that,” said James Hartsfield, a NASA spokesman at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, where Nowak and Oefelein work.

Nowak’s biography shows she is a 1985 graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis with a degree in aerospace engineering, and a former test pilot who has logged more than 1,500 hours of flight in at least 30 types of aircraft.

She joined the space program in 1996. Three members of her astronaut class died in the 2003 in-flight disintegration of Shuttle Columbia.

Married and a mother of three children, her interests include running, playing the piano and collecting African violets, according to her NASA biography.

- end of initial entry -

Laura W. writes:

It always depresses me to see a photo of a female astronaut. I think “Why would any self-respecting woman do this to herself? Could she possibly be willing?” Could she want to put on that hideous suit with all those tabs and zippers? Could she want to sit in front of a control board that has way too many knobs and gauges and dials, eat horrific dried food and spend days floating mindlessly in what is surely the most monotonous place in all the universe with men who can talk about nothing but knobs and gauges and dials? Isn’t this why God made men, so that women could do more important things? My only hope is that every female astronaut is really a man in disguise.

Andrea C. writes:

Laura W. adds nothing except maybe a glimpse into her confusion about “a control board that has way too many knobs and gauges and dials” and “hideous suits with all those tabs and zippers.” In The Closing of the American Mind, Allan Bloom wrote that “the true scientific vocation is rare.” Most of us do not share the drive and curiosity that put people into those kinds of jobs. But it is exceeding levels of drive and curiosity that distinguishes these people and some of them are women. Marie Curie, especially, comes to mind. She pursued difficult studies in Mathematics and Physics while living, quite poor, in an apartment without heat and little food, and far from home, most likely enduring homesickness. It took Curie two years of stirring a cauldron of melting ore with a large heavy metal pole in a freezing-cold rundown lab during her time off from teaching to extract enough radium to prove it’s existence. Such arduous, unglamorous, unpleasant work could only be driven by a love of discovery and understanding, extraordinarily manifest in this one person. In all other aspects, Curie lived a woman’s life with marriage and children. The criminality of Nowak is incidental to her astronautical career. Her criminal actions have one of the most common of all motives in the annals of violent crime, sexual jealousy. An exhaustive list of men and women who have become violent over sexual jealousy could be made and it will show that many different types of people from all walks of life have exhibited this behavior.

On a slightly different note I would like to say that men and women constitute a unity. The differences between them are not of same nature as differences among people of various cultures. Men and women must accept their own and each other’s natural differences. This is endlessly challenging, can be the work of a lifetime, and is often frustrating for both sexes and from time immemorial. But the endeavor to do so ultimately make one morally stronger. We can catalogue the moral deformations that we see every day resulting from the denial of Natural Laws, and of which Feminism is the midwife of many. But I hope that when we do we will always try to label them as such. And I hope that Laura W’s comment was not meant to illustrate some immutable female difference in intellect. Because the differences between men and women are not rooted in the disembodied mind.

LA writes:

I think Andrea misses the humor in Laura’s description of all those “knobs and gauges and dials and hideous suits with all those tabs and zippers.” I suspect that Laura does not object to the heroic scientific career of Madame Curie, but I’ll let her speak for herself.

As for Andrea’s idea that demented criminal violent behavior motivated by sexual jealousy is simply a common affliction if the human race and that this female astronauts’ behavior has no particular significance relating to the choice of women as astronauts, I would suggest that such behavior would have been inconceivable among the earlier astronauts, who were chosen because they had the RIGHT STUFF. But all our standards have been thrown out, which has happened simultaneously with the systematic, quota-ized inclusion of women in previously all-male or predomenantly male domains.

Ben W. writes:

In reference to Laura’s response to the story about the jealous female astronaut, space is God’s joke on us.

We spend billions of dollars in time and energy going out there to discover nothingness (is there something as beautiful as a rose out there?). We “hope” to discover “other” life forms (perhaps comparable agents of intelligence) and find nothing. All because we do not believe that God created man and the earth in his image (so what else is there apart from his image?).

My guess, after all is said and done, in a few hundred years, NASA will be like the Darwinians—still searching for that “something” and telling us that what is important is “the search” (or that science is never complete).

Of course NASA is politicizing space with political correctness. A part of political correctness is the belief that man is not unique and that the cosmos will one day disclose this…

God must be laughing at our attempts to go out into nothingness to find something…

LA replies:
I agree entirely with Ben’s basic point: We deny God, divine reality, the spiritual structure of existence, which surrounds us and is impinging on us every moment, and we go out to outer space looking for … a material substitute for the divine we have rejected.

As the Indian spiritual master Meher Baba once said, “Whether men soar to outer space or dive to the bottom of the deepest ocean they will find themselves as they are, unchanged, because they will not have forgotten themselves nor remembered to exercise the charity of forgiveness.”

Andrea writes:

Thank you for your reply and for posting my comment. I just want to clarify that the idea I was trying to convey, and that you responded to, was not “that demented criminal violent behavior motivated by sexual jealousy is simply a common affliction.” My idea was that demented criminal behavior has very often had sexual jealousy as it’s motive. The motive was common, not the behavior.

LA replies:

You’re right, I did not characterize your comment correctly.

Laura W. writes:

I can only share Andrea’s admiration for the scientific quest, particularly for the sort of lonely, poorly-funded quest represented by Marie Curie. My attempt at humor on a cold Tuesday in February aside, I question whether the astronaut’s work truly represents a scientific quest or the work of highly-skilled engineers who have spent half their life training in gyms and the other half honing the bureaucrat’s talent for following orders. This is not the stuff of scientific legend. An astronaut is engineer, soldier, sailor, male hunk—all mixed in one. Add to that a talent for smiling before a camera and for never publicly questioning the mission and you have the NASA poster boy.

I still maintain that there is one thing an astronaut is not, or should not be. And, that is a woman. I know women can do it. I marvel that any woman would want to. It may be—I can’t speak authoritatively here—but it may be that the one thing that make’s the NASA poster boy’s life bearable is that when he is out there, suspended in that vast and impersonal and ugly darkness, there is a bit of comfort. There may be a bit of comfort in that he has a few buddies along, in that he doesn’t have to worry about any woman for whom he might feel genuine concern, and in that, if the going gets rough, there are other male athletes on board who will respond with utmost speed and military precision. An astronaut is no scientific explorer. And, yet he is a hero in his own way. He faces rough seas, bad food and stupid orders. He is to be pitied, more than envied. Let there be a good woman, her arms flung wide, to welcome every astronaut home.


Posted by Lawrence Auster at February 05, 2007 11:02 PM | Send
    

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