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In 2007, Lisa Marie Nowak was a 43-year-old respected astronaut who had been one of under 600 individuals who could say that they went into space. She traveled over 5 million miles on the Discovery space shuttle that launched on July 4, 2006 for a mission to the International Space Station (ISS). The crew of six astronauts were in space for nearly 13 days, testing new equipment & procedures for the inspection & repair of the thermal protection system that would increase the safety of the space shuttles as well as to deliver supplies & cargo to the ISS.
Sadly, Lisa is no longer known for her tremendous professional achievements as only seven months after her single space mission, her reputation was forever shattered when she made the decision to stalk & confront the woman that she believed was involved with her lover. Lisa drove over 14 hours from her home in Houston, Texas to Orlando, Florida with a wig, a BB gun, plastic gloves, a steel mallet, six feet of rubber tubing, a hunting knife & pepper spray. She also wore a diaper that astronauts frequently wear in order to make better time by not making unnecessary bathroom breaks along the way.
Suddenly, this once esteemed woman became the first astronaut in history to be arrested, let alone charged with felonies. All of her hard work & success was wiped away in an instant & her legacy became a love-crazed astronaut who attacked her rival. Those who knew her grappled to understand how she’d gotten to a place this low & desperate.
After Lisa graduated from the United States Naval Academy in 1985, she earned a master’s degree in aeronautical engineering & a degree in aeronautical astronautical engineering from the Naval Postgraduate School in California. In 1996 she was selected by NASA as one of 44 candidates for NASA Astronaut Group 16, qualifying as a mission specialist in robotics.
In 2007, Lisa was a wife & mom of two who stood at 5’4” & weighed 110#. She had light-brown shoulder-length hair & bangs & although she was quiet, many liked & admired her as someone who was described as cheerful, diligent, smart, nice & brave.
Three years earlier in 2004, she & Bill Oefelein began an affair as his marriage ended & Lisa’s began to fall apart. She wrote a letter in January 2007 that suggested she & Bill were about to start a new life together & the secrecy of their affair would be over. She wrote, Bill is absolutely the best person I’ve ever known & I love him more than I knew possible. Your kindness in supporting us even under such circumstances as have existed in the past is nothing short of extraordinary. Fortunately that past situation is finally coming to a close with formal separation & separate living arrangements accomplished, & I am in the process of completing all the official divorce paperwork. It is long overdue, but it is finally here & I am very much looking forward to getting to know you even better.
Although this letter suggested that things were looking up for Lisa, it turned out that Bill was actually in the process of breaking up with her for a woman named Colleen Shipman, a 30-year-old Air Force captain & engineer who worked on satellite launches from Cape Canaveral, Florida. Weeks later, Bill broke the news to Lisa & explained that he was making his relationship with Colleen exclusive. Moving forward, he incorrectly believed that Lisa accepted his decision & planned to move on.
Only one week after they had this conversation, Lisa packed her car with nefarious supplies & hopped in her car for the 970 mile (1561 km) drive to the Orlando airport. Before she hit the road, she strapped a diaper to her body as she was accustomed to wearing astronaut diapers during the space shuttle’s launch & return to Earth. This time, however, she was on a mission to confront Colleen as she arrived on a flight from Houston to Orlando.
There have been a total of 135 space shuttle launches between 1981 & 2011, all from Kennedy Space Center in Florida, two which were failed missions with the Challenger & the Columbia. The Challenger broke apart 73 seconds into its flight on January 28, 1986, killing all 7 crew members aboard. Columbia disintegrated as it re-entered the atmosphere over Texas & Louisiana, also killing all 7 crew members on February 1, 2003 when they were only sixteen minutes from home.
Lisa actually lost her best friend in the Columbia accident & her arrest came only days after the fourth anniversary of the tragedy. During the aftermath of the crash, she was assigned to her friend’s family as a casualty assistance officer to handle any of the grieving family’s needs.
Each time a shuttle launches, there are 20,000 workers involved & as much as $1 billion dollars spent despite the fact that shuttles themselves are re-used. The massive financial burden is the reason that more missions don’t happen.
Construction for the ISS began on November 20, 1998 & involved a collaboration between the U.S., Russia, Canada, Japan & The European Space Agency. Pieces of the station were sent to space on 42 assembly flights, 37 of which were U.S. space shuttles, five of which were Russian rockets. It cost $160 billion to construct & is the most expensive structure ever built.
The ISS is now reaching the end of its lifespan. There are usually seven astronauts on board, but the number can fluctuate to ten depending on special missions or crew rotations. They each spend an average of six months living & working with the multinational crew that orbits Earth every 92 minutes & hovers 250 miles above our planet, experiencing 16 sunrises & sunsets a day.
Because water behaves very differently on the ISS, turning into floating globules, astronauts on board are only able to bathe with a washcloth. Since there’s no laundry on board, the crew wear the same shirt for 2 weeks at a time & they wear their pants for a couple of months until their clothing is packaged into the trash which is then ejected into space so that it can burn up in the Earth’s atmosphere. The same is done to solid human waste while urine is vacuumed into a tank that is then filtered, recycled & used as drinking water.
After six months on board, astronauts come back with less bone density, muscle mass, vision changes, a weakened immune system & decreased cardiovascular health because of the lack of gravity. To combat this, the astronauts are required to exercise for two hours per day.
The team onboard follows Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) & their workday is strictly scheduled from 6 am – 9:30 pm with their schedules managed down to five-minute increments. 8 ½ hours of sleep are allotted while the work week is divided into 5 ½ working days & 1 ½ days off. This highly structured, rigorous schedule is done intentionally to manage stress, boredom & confinement, all of which are risk factors for interpersonal tension to prevent violence & maintain crew morale.
NASA awarded SpaceX an $843 million contract to construct a vehicle that will deorbit the football-sized field space station. In 2030, after 32 years in orbit, NASA plans to return it to Earth where it will splinter into thousands of pieces before crashing into an unpopulated area of the south Pacific Ocean. Much of the hardware is expected to burn up or vaporize during atmospheric re-entry.
The ISS will eventually be replaced by a combination of commercial, human-tended stations that will be in low orbit (1,200 miles from Earth or less) for research & tourism. The Lunar Gateway, with a planned launch for 2027, is a space station that will orbit the moon & serve as a research platform as well as a staging point for astronauts on their way to the moon’s surface & beyond Mars.
When the affair between Lisa & Bill began in 2004, they had each been married to their respective spouses for sixteen years. Lisa had a 12-year-old son & twin 3-year-old daughters while Bill had a 14-year-old son & a 10-year-old daughter. They had a lot in common; each had been in the Navy with a rank of commander. They found themselves spending time together both at work & play; they were on the same cycling team & trained together. Both astronauts, they also worked & trained together at Johnson Space Center in Houston where they shared a 6th floor office & once spent 11 hours a day together while they were in Canada doing cold-weather survival training.
Despite their professional accolades, their home lives were each deteriorating. Bill’s wife, Michaella, divorced him in 2005 while Lisa & her husband, Richard, separated in early 2007 with the intention to divorce. When Bill found himself a single man, he gave Lisa a key to his new apartment & they fell into an intense, sexual & highly secretive love affair.
Trouble began brewing in November 2006 when Bill crossed paths with Colleen Shipman while they were at a party together during a training mission at Kennedy Space Center in Florida. She found herself laughing all night as she described him as off-the-wall funny. Colleen was a petite, attractive woman who was full of energy & after she graduated in 2002 from Penn State University with degrees in German & chemical engineering, she worked for the Air Force testing hardware for spaceflights. She was well liked by her neighbors, who referred to her as the Little General.
Despite the fact that Bill lived in Houston while Colleen was in Cape Canaveral, Florida, they traveled on weekends to see each other & quickly fell in love. While Bill was on a space mission in December, she sent him an email to outer space with a subject line that read, I need a rubdown. The message itself read, Will have to control myself when I see you. First urge will be to rip your clothes off, throw you on the ground & love the hell out of you. Once back on Earth, the emails continued & Bill told her that he was having Colleen withdrawals. She told him that love was coming his way with kisses, hugs & her legs around him.
Bill was firm on the fact that he had ended his affair with Lisa, whom Colleen had never met. She later told the Orlando police that she discussed this with Bill & questioned if Lisa was okay with everything. She said, You know how these things go. Is there gonna be some crazy lady showing up at my door trying to kill me? Bill assured her that all was well & Lisa was fine with it & happy for him.
It wasn’t until January 2007 when Bill finally worked up the courage to tell Lisa that his feelings for her had changed. He explained that he’d fallen in love with another woman & wanted their relationship to be exclusive, thus he would no longer be seeing her in a romantic way. Those that knew Lisa indicated that her reaction was purely in character; controlled & unemotional. According to Bill, when he broke the news, she seemed a little disappointed, but overall accepting.
Regardless of Bill having this conversation with Lisa, she continued to call him on a daily basis despite the fact that he wasn’t always receptive. She left him nice, non-confrontational messages that were indicative of the person she was. Bill felt confident that all was well & he & Lisa could coexist as friends. They continued to plan bike rides with their bicycle club & they scheduled their flights together for their required flying hours as astronauts. Since Lisa wasn’t a pilot, Bill would be in the pilot’s seat while she would be riding in the back.
Although Bill may have thought that they were living in harmony as friends, this was absolutely not the case on Lisa’s end. That same month, she split up with her husband & her love for Bill had only grown. She believed that he would be in her future.
Bill was blissfully unaware & in love with Colleen while over the course of three weeks, Lisa began to obsessively plan how she would confront Colleen. While she made these plans, she was working as the capsule communicator or the voice of Mission Control for the next shuttle mission.
Lisa got into Bill’s apartment when he wasn’t home, using the key he’d previously given her & she broke into his computer & found Colleen’s travel itinerary for a visit to Houston from February 1-4. She also came across the steamy emails they shared as she began to solidify her plan. She would drive to Orlando where she saw that Colleen was set to land at 1 am on February 5. She printed maps of her driving route as well as the area of Orlando airport & where Colleen lived in a Cape Canaveral neighborhood.
She also made a detailed list of the supplies she would need: Plastic gloves, glasses, makeup, a sharp knife, a gun, binoculars, food, water & a cooler for the car.
When Lisa set off on February 3, she wore a special space diaper, otherwise known as a maximum absorption garment, something astronauts wear when they’re working in space suits for a prolonged period. She later told police officers that she wore the diaper so she wouldn’t have to stop for bathroom breaks.
On her way from Houston to the Orlando airport, Lisa broke up her drive with an overnight stop in DeFuniak Springs, Florida in the panhandle of the state, a five hour & 20 minute drive to Orlando. During her stop, she registered at her hotel under the alias, Linda Turner. By the time she stopped, she had gone through two space diapers.
Meanwhile, while Colleen was in Houston visiting Bill, her weekend was not without concerns. She saw Lisa’s bike in his apartment, something that angered her & made her feel uncomfortable. When she confronted him, he promised he would get rid of it, but it left her questioning if he’d truly cut ties with Lisa while she considered pulling away from their relationship. Not only that, but while they were lying in bed after dinner & drinks during a night out, Bill called Lisa.
When Colleen landed in Orlando at 1 am on February 5, 2007, she learned that her bags wouldn’t be arriving for another 2 ½ hours, so she decided to wait. Little did she know, but Lisa was lurking nearby, watching her, wearing a hooded trenchcoat, round-rimmed red glasses, rolled up jeans, black sneakers & a black wig. Although Colleen had never met her, she had seen a photo of her that Bill had.
Since it was 3:30 am & the airport was quiet, after she finally got her luggage, Colleen boarded an empty shuttle bus while Lisa followed, dressed so strangely that Colleen couldn’t help but notice her. She got off at Colleen’s stop & as Colleen began to climb into her car, Lisa came running across the parking lot. She attempted to open the car door & then slapped at her window, asking her if she could help her. She explained that her boyfriend was supposed to pick her up, but he wasn’t there & she wondered if she could give her a ride to the parking office. Colleen told her no, but she would send someone to help her. When Lisa asked if she could use her cellphone, Colleen told her that the battery was dead & Lisa began to cry.
As they spoke, Colleen remained in her car with the windows closed, but when Lisa told her she couldn’t hear her, Colleen opened the window two inches & Lisa began spraying her with pepper spray as she shrieked, You bitch!
Colleen quickly drove away & a few minutes later the police arrested Lisa while she was attempting to throw away a bag that contained a loaded BB gun that resembled a 9mm semiautomatic & a wig. She carried another bag that contained a steel mallet & a 4” buck knife. When she was asked what she planned to do with the weapons, she explained that she had no intention of harming Colleen & only wanted to scare her into talking. She had no explanation for the plastic gloves, rubber tubing or hammer.
Police also found bondage photos & drawings on a computer disk in her car that included images of an unknown naked woman.
Later that same day, Lisa was charged with attempted murder, attempted kidnapping, attempted burglary, battery & destruction of evidence. This was the first time an astronaut had ever been arrested before, let alone charged with felonies.
Lisa was released on a $25,500 bail, fitted with an ankle GPS monitor so that any attempt to re-enter the state of Florida would be detected. As she made her way to her hotel, she covered her head so the media wasn’t able to photograph her. The following day, she took a plane back to Houston & went back to her 3,100 square foot home northeast of NASA that she once shared with her happy family of five. As her parents joined her at home, a media storm gathered around her.
One month later, on March 7, Lisa was informed that NASA would no longer employ her as an astronaut. She still officially worked for the Navy although they would likely just retire her. According to a crewmate on her space mission, Mark Kelly, when he talked to Lisa, she sounded depressed & was spending her time isolated in her house all day, every day.
When she met with Naval officials in April, they indicated they would wait to make any decisions until after her criminal trial that would be held in Orlando.
Lisa had been previously trying her best to balance her arduous professional life as an astronaut with her personal journey through motherhood. When her son, Alexander, was nine, she gave birth to twin girls, Alyssa & Katrina. Her husband worked in Mission Control, but they somehow made it work. Her friend described her as someone who was sincere & you would never know her tremendous professional accomplishments since she didn’t brag about herself.
While she was preparing for her space mission, Lisa’s workweek grew to somewhere around seventy hours in the midst of caring for her three very young children. The stress was likely mounting & she was also wrapped up in a full-blown love affair with a fellow astronaut. It’s unclear if she was suffering from a mental breakdown or if she had been suffering from ongoing mental illness, but she never opened up to anyone at NASA about her struggles. After her arrest, many questioned how they hadn’t noticed her emotional struggles.
Because astronauts compete for exceptionally limited spots on few remaining shuttle missions, they will go to extraordinary lengths to conceal any issues that might keep them from flying.
If convicted, Lisa faced up to 30 years in prison. However, in November 2009, Lisa pleaded guilty to reduced charges of burglary & misdemeanor battery. She was ordered to spend only two days in jail, but was given credit for time already spent after her arrest making the sentencing moot. She was ordered to send Colleen a sincere letter of apology & have no further contact with her or Bill.
Colleen told the Florida judge that Lisa’s calm demeanor should not be trusted & she is 100% sure that she planned to murder her. Not only did she have nefarious supplies, but she also looked up the terms, corpse & dismemberment beforehand. Colleen indicated that she lost her Air Force job due to the health issues that stemmed from the attack. She continued to suffer from nightmares, high blood pressure, chest pains & dizzy spells related to stress. She barricaded her doors & purchased weapons to protect herself.
Both Bill & Colleen retired from the military in 2008 & moved to Alaska where Bill had grown up. He proposed in 2009 at the start of a wilderness float trip during a time when they were out of reach from family & friends for a week. He’d hidden her engagement ring in his fishing box while they sent out the news of their engagement to family with a programmed message using a spot tracking device. He hadn’t realized that the message he programmed automatically inserted the word HELP, so when the message went out it said, HELP I asked Colleen to marry me & she said yes. The couple went on to have a son & start a freelance writing & photography career.
Not only was Lisa fired from NASA, but in 2010, she received an other than honorable discharge from the Navy, the most severe nonpunitive discharge. A People article from 2022 indicated that Lisa was living a quiet life in Houston, she avoids the media, her children are grown & she is finally at peace & living a quiet life.
References:
- Wikipedia: STS-121
- Wikipedia: Lisa Nowak
- Science Friday: What will replace the International Space Station?
- Wikipedia: Lunar Gateway
- CNN World: What’s it like to live on the International Space Station?
- NASA: The International Space Station Transition Plan
- YouTube: The Space Race: What life inside the International Space Station is like
- Wikipedia: Space Shuttle Challenger disaster
- Wikipedia: Space Shuttle Columbia disaster
- Reuters: Former NASA astronaut avoids jail for attack
- Military.com: Other than honorable discharge: Everything you need to know
- People: Astronaut love triangle: Lisa Nowak ‘is finally at peace’ 15 years after attacking romantic rival
- CBC News: Astronaut charged with attempted murder in bizarre love triangle
- Texas Monthly: Lust in space
- People: Astronaut love triangle: Colleen Shipman says of her husband: ‘They were making him out to be something horrible’
