Just checking in from London Towne (literally--I just checked in to my hotel). It's noon here, early in the US, but not so early that my TCSDaily piece isn't up. I have some thoughts on Lisa Nowak, and NASA.

I'm having dinner with Perry De Havilland tonight, and then off on the train to Brussels on the morrow.

"First off, regardless of what one thinks about her lapse of ethical judgment, she didn't seem to lose any technical competence. As would usually be the case with a high achiever like this, the whole thing seemed to be meticulously planned, and had her intended victim not been a trained astronaut herself, she might have gotten away with it cleanly, with simply an unsolved murder mystery."

Either I haven't yet had enough coffee, or you've made a strange error here. Her victim (Shipman) wasn't an astronaut, trained or untrained. What're you trying to say here?

I'm in hurry today.

First, everyone try to read Diane Vaughan's The Challenger Launch Decision. You'll get an interesting, well informed look at the NASA culture problem.

Second, it's not just the astronaut corps -- or even NASA.

One of the reasons I have some clearly libertarian sympathies is because libertarians have caught on to the fact that highly centralized control is not exactly healthy. Other libertarians than me focus more on government, but at least that's much better than people who think "control" will work once the right people have the right tools.

Now I've got to run.

Enjoy London, Rand. It might be my favorite city in the entire world. It certainly beats Washington, DC by a long shot.

Andy got the comment in first, but Capt Shipman is an Air Force engineer stationed on the Florida coast. She likely has thoughts of applying to be an astronaut (note her involvement with a helicpoter training school on her request to keep Lisa Nowak away from her) but she's not an astronaut now.

I'm with Andy and Tom, and I also think you missed the basic reason for "too many astronauts": Bureaucracies are apt to continue processes for which they receive budget long after the utility of such processes has been exhausted. In short, spend it or lose it. NASA gets money for training astronauts for flight and for training new astronauts. If you don't hire enough new astronauts to train, you'll lose budget for training them.

As for the stresses that resulted in a short "high" for Lisa and thus developed in a steep "low" for her career and personal life, I mentioned the same on Instawife's (Dr Helen's) blog a few days ago. I do think she had a rather dramatic fall from her great accomplishments this summer which were capped off by losing the man she left her marriage for.

The TCS piece looks like using this event as an opportunity to take yet another cheap shot at NASA--she cracked because she didn't have any more flight opportunities and that's because NASA is the messed up organization you claim it is? If that's true, how come all the other astronauts who are told they won't fly again don't go psycho?

As others noted, you got Shipman's occupation wrong.

You also spelled Nowak's name two different ways.

You oversimplify why NASA loaded up on astronauts in the 1990s. A lot of them were brought in to fill ISS administrative posts. They may have been lied to about their prospects of flying, but JSC wanted to have astronauts making key decisions about ISS and realized that they needed more astronauts to do this.

I also fail to note much sympathy for her victim. Lots of sympathy for Nowak, but she's not the one who was stalked or sprayed with pepper spray, right?

> Lisa Nowack went to the Naval Academy, became a Navy pilot

No. The press has been saying this, but from what I can tell, it isn't true.

According to her official bio, Lisa Nowak went to the Academy and became a Naval Flight Officer. That is not a pilot.

In Naval parlance, a pilot is an "Aviator." A "Naval Flight Officer" is an officer who flies but not as a pilot. In her case, an electronic warfare officer.

Her bio also says she graduated from the Navy Test Pilot School at Pax River but that does not make her a pilot. The "test pilot" schools graduate flight test engineers as well as test pilots.

Her bio is a bit confusing at one point, where it says she flew A-6s and F/A-18s. From the other information, I'm pretty sure it means she flew *in* A-6s and F/A-18s.

An FAA database search shows no pilot certificate in her name. That is not definitive, since military pilots are not required to have civilian certificates but most do because they want to fly civlian airplanes occassionally.

Boy, Rand, I sure hope that column was written in a hurry with some other personal concerns pressing in, because it comes across as flippant and underthought, and, as someone already said, a mean-spirited cheap shot at NASA.

Maybe consider the possibility that, even if their general approach is a mistake, the folks at NASA -- including those in the astronaut's office -- are just reg'lar folks doing their best, as the mandates from Congress and The People keep flopping about randomly, and try a little Christian charity (or at least humility) next time.

It could be you, after all. I'm sure lots of aerospace engineers do some unfortunate things when their marriages break up. That doesn't make them sociopaths who need to be screened out of their profession. It just makes them human. What makes Lisa Nowak unusual is not the intention or the action per se -- plenty of women conceive the intent to savage romantic rivals in a triangle, and many of them give it a shot. What makes Nowak special is the single-mindedness and attention to detail she exhibited about her crazy momemt. But then, that's the overachiever. If you do something stupid, you do it unusually effectively.

Your actual point -- which is good -- that there is a human cost associated with putting someone on top of Everest and then asking them to accept living in Kansas for the rest of their life, could have been made much better with less jabbing at NASA. You could've compared to Olympic athletes, for example, who have had similar problems. You could have made the point that this is part of the problem with a celebrity culture in general, and a good reason to hope that private space industry will make being an astronaut less of a celebrity job.

I thought Rand's TCS piece was spot-on and anyone here criticizing it are way off base. Rand in no way is excusing what Nowak did. Instead, he is making cogent remarks about the NASA and about how bureaucracies work in general.

Based on my personal experience dealing with bureaucracies, I consider Rand's suggestion that the NASA flight managers delibertly creating a larger than necessary astronaut corp, just for the purpose of keeping them in-line, entirely believable. This is in keeping with every bureaucracy I have had the experience in dealing with. The managers in charge very much like to have a large pool of people under them so that they can abuse them. This is true in medicine, where they have a large number of nurses in the operating bay so that if the MD screws up, they can blame it on a nurse and fire them.

NASA, like any other large organization, is clearly disfunctional. The purpose of NASA is to keep 20,000 civil servants employed until retirement. This is Pournelle's Iron law of bureaucracy and is the reason why space development will not occur as long as NASA continues to exist.

Anyone who still believes that any large-scale human organization is capable of productive effort need to understand the iron law of bureaucracy. This is the primary reason why, at age of 43, I am still as much of a libertarian as I was at age 23. I simply do not believe that any large scale human organization is capable of productive effort, nor do I consider any philosophy, ideology, or religion that promotes the existance of large scale social organizations to have a legitimate role in modern society.

ALL large scale social institutions are obsolete and get in the way of people who want to do real, creative work. The sooner we get rid of them, the better off we will be.

It's fairly common for organizations to create highly trained, stringtly-selected groups of specialists in various special skills and then end up using them mostly for other purposes. The Three Musketeers seemed to never actually fight with muskets. Airborne forces mostly get used as elite infantry. And NASA astronauts are highly skilled engineers/administrators/public relations agents who essentially hold a lottery ticket for a space flight. Well, the odds are better than the average lottery ticket buyer's at the 7-11, but the ticket price is muh higher.

I think most astronaut candidates know this by now -- they just tend to think they'll be lucky.

What gets me is this attempt to use one person's actions to indict the entire agency: she did this because of the fact that NASA does not create enough flight opportunities?

First, isn't that psychoanalysis without a license? How do you know that this is what pushed her over the edge? Why not blame it on the Navy, or her husband, or a chemical imbalance, or the lack of midnight basketball leagues in Clear Lake? Or - here's a thought - why not simply accept that either we don't know why she flipped out, or that she herself is responsible for her actions? That might be the libertarian way, accepting that the individual alone is responsible for one's actions.

Second, what excuse would you reach for if she wasn't an astronaut but instead was a nurse, or a dog catcher?

Doesn't all this illustrate that what she did is outlying behavior that is not easily explained? What she did would be totally unusual no matter what her profession.

So by reaching to make a point that NASA is to blame, you're showing your biases. It really is a cheap shot.

I'm going to point everyone again to my earlier post.

Do read Diane Vaughan's The Challenger Launch Decision, She's actually done a great deal of research. The book is highly informative.

No, it's not just a problem of one individual going off the tracks.

No, it's not just a problem of one individual going off the tracks.

Posted by Chuck Divine at February 11, 2007 05:07 AM

...

It is two problesm actually. It is a problem of one individuals short comings and completly turning her back on her commission...and NASA corporate leadership, the head of the astronaut office, and the senior USN officer on deck neglecting theirs.

That latter part is the corporate problems that are traceable back to Columbia/Challenger et al.

Robert

Robert Oler will soon start to tell us how he, as a decorated Naval aviator and personal pal of all the 'stros, is in constant contact with everyone ans that he, and he alone, is the only one with all the answers.