Astronaut’s Arrest Spurs Review of NASA Testing Her Actions Raised No Alarm, Agency Says

By John Schwartz

Ralph Blumenthal contributed reporting from Houston.

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NASA is reviewing its psychological screening and checkup process following the arrest of Lisa Marie Nowak, the astronaut accused of attempted murder, space agency officials said.

They will also try to determine whether officials missed “indications of concern” in Nowak’s case.

Officials said, however, that her behavior had raised no concerns recently and that she had been at work last week preparing for her job at mission control for the next shuttle flight in March.

Nowak flew from Florida to Houston on Wednesday morning. She covered her head with a jacket as she got off a commercial airliner and then was taken to the Johnson Space Center, where she was given medical tests, a space agency spokesman said.

The sad homecoming capped a tumultuous few days in which Nowak drove more than 900 miles, or 1,500 kilometers, from Texas to Florida to confront an air force captain, Colleen Shipman, whom she believed to be a rival for the affections of another astronaut. The police say Nowak sprayed Shipman with pepper spray at the Orlando airport early Monday.

Nowak, who had worn adult diapers on the drive so that she would not have to stop to relieve herself, brought along a disguise, a compressed-air pistol, a steel mallet, a knife, latex gloves and garbage bags, the police said. She was charged Tuesday with attempted murder and released on bail.

NASA officials have said that this appears to be the first felony charge against an active-duty astronaut.

On Tuesday, Shipman filed a request for a protective order against Nowak. In the request, she stated that Nowak had been stalking her for about two months and referred to the astronaut who is the focus of Nowak’s jealousy, William Oefelein, as her “boyfriend.” She also said that she had not met Nowak until the attack.

The officials said that Nowak’s parents had come to Houston from their home in Rockville, Maryland, to help her, and that her husband was taking care of the children. The couple separated recently, the family has said.

At a news conference in Washington, NASA officials described the events after Nowak’s arrest. Shipman informed Oefelein, who was on leave in Florida, of the attack. He notified Ellen Ochoa, the director of flight crew operations early Monday. The director of the Johnson Space Center, Michael Coats, then dispatched one of Nowak’s fellow astronauts, Steven Lindsey, to Florida to “offer any appropriate assistance.” The arrest set the agency’s review process in motion, said Shana Dale, the NASA deputy administrator. One Tuesday morning, the NASA administrator, Michael Griffin, ordered Coats to conduct a review of the space agency’s initial screening and “ongoing psychological assessments during an astronaut’s career,” Dale said. On Wednesday, Griffin ordered a broader inquiry run out of Washington that will use outside experts, she said. The two-level review process is intended to find out whether astronauts are getting the “level of psychological and medical care and attention they need,” Dale said. Despite the review, she added, “we think we’re doing things very, very well.”

She said that the Nowak case should have no long-term impact on the space agency, calling it “a unique situation.” Agency officials insisted that asking for help with emotional problems did not hurt an astronaut’s chance of flying, but Dr. Jon Clark, a former NASA physician, said in an interview, “What people say and what’s reality are two different things.”"Astronauts know there is a stigma attached to this stuff,” he added. The psychological services are delivered only on demand, he said, which is a problem for self- reliant astronauts. “They won’t come to you and say, ‘I’ve got a problem,’” he said.

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