Just in time for Valentine's Day. First there was this:
A married woman who was having an affair with a fellow skydiver plunged 13,000ft (4,000m) to her death after her love rival and best friend tampered with her parachute, police say.
Els Van Doren, 37, fell to earth in a garden in front of a group of onlookers. Els Clottemans, 22, has been charged with her murder.
Minutes earlier the pair had joined hands in a star formation with two other skydivers including Ms Clottemans’s boyfriend, a Dutchman named only as Marcel, who police say was having an affair with Mrs Van Doren.
While he and Ms Clottemans broke away at 4,000ft when their parachutes inflated, Mrs Van Doren, a mother of two, was unable to open either her main parachute or the reserve and crashed to her death in the town of Opglabbeek, Belgium.
Now there's
this:
A female astronaut with Maryland ties was charged today with the attempted murder of a woman she believed to be the rival love interest of a space shuttle pilot, according to charging documents.
Capt. Lisa Nowak, 43, a Rockville native and Naval Academy graduate, allegedly drove 900 miles straight from Texas to Florida to confront Air Force Capt. Colleen Shipman after Shipman disembarked from a 1 a.m. commercial flight at Orlando International Airport. Nowak followed Shipman to her car from a parking bus and doused her with pepper spray, the documents say.
And how did this rocket scientist set about to carry off her fiendish plan?
Nowak had brought a disguise, high-powered BB gun, steel mallet, buck knife, three to four inches of rubber tubing, several large plastic garbage bags, $600 and six latex gloves. She also had brought diapers that allowed her to drive without stopping to urinate, the documents said.
Donning sunglasses, a wig and trench coat, Nowak waited for Shipman to arrive on the 1 a.m. flight Monday morning and followed her onto a parking shuttle bus, records show. Shipman became alarmed when Nowak appeared to be following her, so she rushed to her car and locked the door, hearing "running footsteps" behind her.
The suspicious woman, who Shipman did not know was Nowak, slapped the window, tried to open the door, began crying and then asked for a ride to the parking office, saying her boyfriend had failed to pick her up. Shipman declined, and Nowak asked to use her cell phone, which she also declined. Nowak said she couldn't hear, so Shipman rolled down the window slightly before Nowak doused her with pepper spray. Shipman sped off, the documents say, eventually finding police, who arrested Nowak after she attempted to trash the disguise.
Transterrestrial weighs in: 'Unjustified astronaut worship is one of the unfortunate consequences that lingers on, almost half a century after the Cold-War space program began. Just one more reason to try to privatize things ASAP. And of course, this is going to unfairly reflect badly on all the astronauts who really do have the "right" stuff.'
Dr. Sanity:
Nevertheless, if you treat astronauts like Hollywood superstars; promote them to the public as if they were God's gift to humanity; cater to their narcissistic fantasies; and indulge them in all sorts of special ways, it is not too hard to predict that they will behave just like any other entitled superstar (or politician) whose ridiculous exploits the public follows with obsessive interest.
Why bother to go to the trouble of choosing "the right stuff" in the first place when the superstar culture of the astronauts only encourages the worst sort of narcissism and sociopathy?
Wizbang has more.
Tammy Bruce:
That concern is with the the diaper-clad love-lorn astronaut, not the Air Force captain (Colleen Shipman) who was the intended target, mind you. And I would think her 'status' has changed. She's in jail now. And last time I checked that was on Planet Earth.
No wonder our space program is in such trouble.
And can someone tell me, why do bad things happen to people's hair when they get arrested? Is Bad Hair a pre- or post-arrest event? And if it's pre, I think we have a pretty good argument here to arrest everyone walking around with bed-head past 1pm.
NASA:
The following is a statement from Michael Coats, director of NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, regarding the status of astronaut Lisa Nowak.
"We are deeply saddened by this tragic event. The charges against Lisa Nowak are serious ones that must be decided by the judicial system. She is officially on 30-day leave and has been removed from flight status and all mission-related activities. We will continue to monitor developments in the case."
OPFOR: 'If only our body politic and our some of our elected officials were as ruthlessly single-minded.'
