On today, 2007 February 6, a disaster hit NASA, possibly even worse than the Apollo, Challenger, and Columbia disasters. One of NASA's astronauts was arrested and charged with attempted first-degree murder as a result of a love triangle. Today Lisa Nowak drove 900 miles in diapers from Houston to Orlando to pepper spray her amor's other girlfriend, and the equipment she had suggested that she may have been attempting to murder her - a knife, trash bags, rubber tubing.
To me love triangles are among the most irrational of human behavior. It happens when someone is in love with someone and that love finds someone else to go with instead. It seems that people get really irrational when that happens. The jilted lover will take all kinds of revenge against the amour, or even against the other person. If someone's stereo set were stolen, normally we don't go out and get revenge against the robber. We instead call the police and let them handle it, and consult our insurance company. So why do people go off the handle like Lisa did when it is a lover that is "stolen"? Maybe it is because of the loss of a loved one. In any case, people simply go cuckoo when they see that there is another lover, or when someone's spouse is found to have an affair. And the popular song and myth culture does not help any, not when Hera takes it out on Callisto because her husband Zeus has an affair with her, and not with songs that say that if you go away, they might as well take the Sun away.
NASA selects its astronauts carefully. They go through physical and psychological testing to ensure that each astronaut has "the right stuff" as the movie says. But apparently love triangle violence trumps the right stuff. How did this happen? Is the training too severe for them? Do they break down?
To me what it means is that we are not ready for Mars. President Bush called on us to get people on Mars in about 20 years or so. But if astronauts try to kill each other, how can this happen? We are decades away from a successful Mars mission, maybe centuries. If astronauts can't live with each other on our big wide wonderful planet, what will they do when they are cooped up in a tiny space vehicle for over a year and a half? Before we can send a Mars mission, we must learn to reject love triangles and learn to love each other for real.
