Space Psychosis and the Lethal Love Triangle

If you’ve flicked by CourtTV, CNN, the New York Times or pretty much any media outlet anywhere, you may have noticed the appearance of one very disheveled-looking Lisa Marie Nowak. A married mother of three and NASA astronaut, Nowak is being held in Florida on charges of attempting to kidnap and murder the woman who was supposedly dating the object of her affection. Which sounds kind of insane for a woman with a Master’s Degree in Aeronautical Engineering who also passed rigorous psychological tests to qualify for active flight status. But then again, space can make you wacko. No really.

Spaceflight is considered an isolated, confined and extreme (ICE) environment by psychologists. There you are, trapped in a tin tube with the same annoying people for countless days, weeks or months, limited communication to loved ones, floating underpants, tubes for peeing and generally elevated levels of stress. Researchers like psychiatrist Nick Kanas at the University of California, San Francisco have spent years analyzing journals and taking surveys in hopes to better prepare and counsel astronauts against the mental strain. According to a 1997 paper by Kanas in Advances in Space Biology and Medicine the observed space-ailments include anxiety, depression, psychosis (or hallucinations), psychosomatic symptoms, emotional reactions related to mission stage, postflight personality changes and marital problems (of which Mrs. Nowak is probably having some right about now…)

In a similar vein, researchers have developed psychometric tools to help gage who is likely too keep their mental cool under the exotic space conditions and who is likely to loose it both on mission and after their return. Not that the tests always work (for example, Nowak).

Take this quote from the abstract of a 2003 paper in Human Performance in Extreme Environments:

“Although these psychological instruments excluded some people from becoming astronauts, the battery of tests failed to predict which individuals would manifest behavioral aberrations in judgment, cooperative functioning, overt irritability, or destructive interpersonal actions.”

I’d say that homicidal jealousy is a pretty destructive interpersonal action.

Nowak was one of the crew aboard the Discovery mission to the International Space Station last July. During her training she fell in love with fellow astronaut William Oefelein, who piloted the same shuttle to the ISS in December. They never flew together. Then Nowak got wind that Oefelein was dating Air Force Captain Colleen Shipman, which displeased her greatly. The evidence gathered so far suggests that Nowak decided to eliminate the competition after a couple months of solid stalking.

According to media reports, Nowak found out that Shipman was flying from Houston to Orlando on Monday. She drove more than 900 miles to meet the flight with a BB gun, pepper spray, latex gloves, a buck knife, rubber tubing, garbage bags, $600, Shipman’s address, a letter detailing how much she loved Oefelein and printouts of email conversations between Oefelein and the other woman. Nowak waited for Shipman at the Orlando airport. She was wearing diapers to avoid missing her target on a bathroom break. 

After Nowak – disguised in a wig and trench coat - tried to “talk” to Shipman with the help of a little pepper spray, Shipman made a quick get away in her car and called the cops.

Now one could argue that Nowak was just expressing pathological symptoms of obsession. Love is a dangerous game. On the other hand, her actions bear a striking resemblance to some space-related psychological problems (personality changes and aberrations in judgment come to mind). True she was only in orbit for 12 days, and the most severe symptoms of space trauma usually crop up in the crew of long-term missions. But hey.

All in all it’s just too bad that she wasn’t one of the astronauts who returns to Earth just bursting with warm fuzzies after seeing the beauty and fragility of their home planet from a distance. In a 2006 paper, Kanas and his colleagues suggested that such “positive mental health effects may help protect flight crews from the psychological stress inherent in such high-risk missions.” Maybe the NASA doctors should encourage astronauts to look out the window if they start to feel psychotic.