
Lust in Space (2007) - doppp
https://www.texasmonthly.com/articles/lust-in-space/
======
gboone
The reader shouldn't miss a main point: the precision to which astronaut
duties are carried out is exhibited as ingrained into the fabric of how that
person operates.

The diaper would have been standard protocol for a long mission seated. In
this case, it was while driving in a car to confront someone 900 miles away.
She meticulously planned her own mission.

They handle stressful situations systematically. In this case, the guy handles
multiple affairs while lying and operates with his own emergency checklist.

The article doubles as a report of "look how much money has been spent at NASA
this is all we've done."

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darkerside
Top comment is currently a Jan at the title and byline. I hope people will
overlook that fault and read. It's astonishing to look back at this incident
from over a decade ago, remember my reaction to it then, and compare it to my
understanding now. My perceptions of NASA and my empathy for Nowak are night
and day.

~~~
mikekchar
At your urging, I read it. I knew nothing of this event in 2007. I have no
interest in reading about people having terrible mental breakdowns when their
love life spirals out of control. Why would you want to pry into this person's
life? Because they were once famous? Is it really your business to have an
opinion one way or another? Was this ever really news to begin with? Just
because the person in question was once famous?

Maybe I'm being too hard. I've been the subject of the rumour mill before. At
one point I was virtually the only foreign person that lived in the small town
in Japan where I taught English (there are hundreds now -- really hard to
believe). Every step I took was seen by someone. If I went out on a date, it
was common knowledge to people I'd never even met. If I broke up with someone,
there were people debating whose fault it was. They had never spoken a word to
me in their life.

I'm pretty easy going and I know people are going to be people. They are going
to talk about stuff. I get it. But, seriously: why are you urging people to
read this? Why does it need to be dredged up again? So that people can get a
better view? So that they can have empathy -- with a person they have never
met? A person that they will almost certainly never meet?

I mean it's one thing if the person themselves had written a story about it
and encouraged people to read it. Or even collaborated with the author. Or
even responded to questions from the author. I get absolutely _no_ impression
that this person _wants people to revisit this episode of their life_. Why are
you making that decision for them? Why do you suppose it is your right?
Because they were once famous? Because you knew their name and decided that
you wanted to know more?

I'm sorry to be so hard here, but if you want to be empathetic, just remember
that a person's life is the only thing they've really got. If you make a
terrible, terrible mistake in public, it's not going to be erased, but you can
make their life a _lot_ easier: just forget about it.

~~~
jsjohnst
Seriously thank you for writing this. It’s my thoughts entirely, but way
better said than I could’ve, with a personal anecdote that is easier to follow
than the one I would’ve used.

~~~
an_d_rew
And I will add my thanks, too... your comment, @mikekchar, is much
appreciated!

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Merrill
"On November 10, 2009, Nowak entered a guilty plea to felony burglary and
misdemeanor battery. She was sentenced to a year's probation and the two days
already served in jail, with no additional jail time."

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisa_Nowak#Developments_in_cas...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisa_Nowak#Developments_in_case)

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eps
> _Lisa Nowak, the lovesick astronaut in the diaper_

This reeks of a complete lack of basic empathy and rudimentary respect towards
another human being. How can anyone write this sort of junk, leave alone
publishing it?

Flagged.

~~~
henriquemaia
It seems to me that you're falling into a misconception of assuming that
sentence is saying something it actually isn't. As I see it, the misconception
is twofold: 1. assuming an intent without contextualising it with the rest of
the piece; 2. reading it assuming a 2019 interpretation fit events that
happened in 2007.

As for 1, the whole article tries to show there's more to the story than that
astronaut being simply an "astronut". As for 2, we have now a distance to
those events to ignore how things were being reported back then (the daily
noise around the issue) — that sentence being a play with the common
conception of the scandal and a hint on how the article tries to go against it
(or at least complicate it further, adding many emotional layers).

So my conclusion is that your assessment is not valid and thus misleading.

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mac01021
> with makeup on and her hair done, she can look pretty in a homespun,
> American sort of way.

Who is the intended audience for this article?

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cwe
From [2013], or even [2007]

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connar3231
She was in mad love in her 40's. Is it possible to have lust and love which is
stronger in 40's than in 17 to 20 age ? . To be honest i am kind of relived
that i can find some one to love and lust for in my teens.

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luc4sdreyer
>This was accompanied by an equally peremptory demand to finish the $100
billion International Space Station—another purposeless project...

It's hard do take this article seriously when they casually assert that the
ISS has no purpose.

~~~
9nGQluzmnq3M
The article goes into this in more depth later:

 _It would be unfair to say that no worthwhile science has been done on the
station. Advances have been made in learning how humans react to long periods
in space and in learning about technologies that work in zero gravity. “If you
ask NASA what we’re doing on the space station,” says Robert Park, a professor
of physics at the University of Maryland who is a longtime critic of the
manned space program, “they say we are learning how to live in space. But it
is not clear that we are learning anything new about how to live in space. We
have been doing that for a long time, and there is nothing else going on.
There is, for all practical purposes, zero research going on on the space
station, and it was built as a scientific laboratory, which was preposterous
in the first place.” There is wide consensus that space station science is, at
best, minor science and, at worst, a rerun of the same antigravity and human
physiology experiments that the Soviets were doing on the Mir space station in
1986._

