The Crazy-With-Love Astronaut

NASA doesn’t immediately come to mind as a place likely to foster salacious love triangles. But then there was Lisa Nowak. An astronaut specializing in robotics, Nowak, 43, had a 20-year career with the U.S. Navy and NASA under her belt, flying aboard the space shuttle Discovery and logging time at the International Space Station. At home, her story was standard enough: a husband she’d met at Navy flight school, three children, a house on a cul-de-sac in Houston, and a flair for bicycling, cooking, and crossword puzzles. Yet over the course of a 900-mile drive in 2007, Nowak apparently went from space star to space cadet. After learning that an astronaut she’d been dating had taken up with another woman, she allegedly went on a mad race to confront—and assault—her romantic rival in Orlando. Police arrested Nowak wearing a trench coat and a wig at the airport, saying she attacked the woman, an Air Force engineer, with pepper spray in the parking lot. They found a four-inch knife, BB gun, surgical tubing, maps to the woman’s home, and latex gloves in Nowak’s car, along with the most enticing items of all: three soiled diapers, which police said she had worn on the journey to save time. Nowak rejects the diaper claim, arguing they were size “toddler 3” and left over from the family’s Hurricane Rita evacuation in 2005. The matter was never settled, and the diapers were never entered as evidence, though they provided endless fodder for late-night comedians. In a deal with prosecutors, Nowak admitted to the lesser charges of third-degree felony burglary and misdemeanor battery. She was sentenced to a year’s probation and 50 hours of community service. She was also told to send a letter of apology to her romantic rival.