I was working on the idea of a homicide in the cosmos when I wondered, what would make a person as well-grounded and stable as an astronaut want to commit murder?
Then I remembered what happened on February 4, 2007, in what became an extraordinary, though not admirable, day in the history of the American space program. On that date, Lisa Nowak--Navy Captain, veteran shuttle astronaut, accomplished pilot and engineer--accosted an Air Force officer, her rival in a love triangle involving a fellow astronaut. Nowak was arrested with an assortment of items, including pepper spray, a hammer, a knife, black latex gloves, disguises, hundreds in cash, that pointed to sinister outcomes. She was charged with a variety of crimes, the most serious being attempted first-degree murder with a deadly weapon. As the case slogged through the judicial process, she ended up pleading guilty to felony burglary and misdemeanor battery. The Navy mustered her out with a "less than honorable discharge" and a reduction in rank to commander. It was an ignominious saga of a person who had lost her way. But it made me think about the broader implications of this sad tale.
Candidates for the astronaut program endure an exceptionally competitive selection process to be then subjected to comprehensive psychological examinations and intense training to determine that they won't go crackers under pressure. Astronauts are probably the most cool-headed individuals in service. Consider that aboard both the Challenger and the Columbia, the flight crews attempted to gain--futilely as it turned out--manual and spontaneous unrehearsed control of their doomed craft in the short moments before destruction. Such heroics point to the exceptional caliber of astronauts on one end of the performance spectrum and now, thanks to Lisa Nowak, NASA has to seriously consider behavior at the other end of that spectrum, in this case, the possibility of a murderous love triangle in space.
The most memorable manslaughter in space depicted in popular culture was in 2001: A Space Odyssey, when the AI brain HAL decides that the human crew will compromise the mission and so proceeds to off them, three in cold-blooded assassination by yanking the plug of their hibernation capsules, and the other by staging a Mafia-style hit using an EVA pod as a murder weapon.
Is homicide in the heavens inevitable? Hopefully not. Keep in mind that the real-life scenarios most replicating deep-space travel are the deployments aboard nuclear submarines, where male-female crews stay submerged for up to three months at a time. A fellow writer who was a Navy submariner tells me that such prolonged isolation from the natural world and sunlight, in his words, "Really fucks with your mind," but so far, no murders at sea.
