The weekly newsletter for Fed2 by ibgames

EARTHDATE: February 11, 2007

Official News - page 6

REAL LIFE NEWS: ASTRONAUT LOVE TRIANGLE KIDNAP PLOT

by Hazed

What a gift for a newsdroid this story is. It ticks all of the boxes that make it suitable for a real life news story in the Fed2 Star. It's about astronauts so falls into the "space" category. It's about a crime that went wrong so it counts as a "dumb criminal" story. And it's just so weird that it makes you go "Huh?" You could describe the story as "Apollo 13" meets "Fatal Attraction", as it concerns a female astronaut who turned out to have the wrong stuff!

Navy Captain Lisa Nowak works for NASA and flew to the International Space Station last summer, but she has now got into massive trouble because of a rather pathetic kidnap plot. She fell in love with another astronaut, Cmdr William Oefelein, who was a pilot on the Discovery's mission to the ISS in December - even though Nowak is married with three children. But she feared there was a rival for her affection, so she set off on a 1,000 mile drive from her home in Texas to Florida, where she planned to kidnap Colleen Shipman, an engineer with the 45th Launch Support Squadron.

She disguised herself with a wig and a trenchcoat, and wore a nappy so she wouldn't have to stop for toilet breaks. (Actually, that's not as strange as it sounds - astronauts always wear nappies during take-off and landing because they don't have the time to go to the bathroom when the clock is counting down!)

When she arrived at her destination, she followed Shipman in a airport bus and pursued her to her vehicle. Shipman locked herself in, but then when Nowak began to cry, she rolled down her window – at which point, Nowak used pepper spray on her. Shipman then drove to a car park booth and called the police.

An officer followed Nowak and stopped her, and found she was also carrying an air rifle, a steel mallet and a knife. In her car, she had copies of emails beween Shipman and Oefelein, as well as rubber tubing and rubbish sacks.

She has been arrested on charges of attempted murder, attempted kidnapping and battery.

In her defense, Nowak told police she just wanted to scare her rival into talking about her relationship with Commander Oefelein. Her family have also defended her, saying the charges "infer too much" from her actions. I must say, it's hard to infer much less when you take into account the equipment she had with her!

Following this story breaking, NASA has said it will re-evaluate the psychological screening it gives its astronauts. The space agency said that prior to this incident there had not been the slightest hint that anything was wrong with Nowak, but that they would go back over her records to see if there were any red flags they missed.

Meanwhile, Shipman is seeking a restraining order, claiming she was stalked for two months before the incident.

Well! And I thought relationships in Fed DataSpace get fraught - talk about lust in space!


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