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Astronaut-Gone-Wild Incident Highlights 'Sex on Mars' Issue

There are taboos and there are taboos, but there are no bigger taboos in technology reporting than writing frankly about either politics or sex. Yet the latter, as spotlighted in this week's astronaut-gone-wild case involving Lisa Nowak, has clear implications for the arena which is this country's crowning technological achievement: Space flight.

Dating back to the early days of the Mercury program, NASA has selected astronauts with an eye toward putting forth an all-American, can-do image. John Glenn was the most archetypical of the early test-pilot types, where the template was a white male who was Gary Cooper-esque in his public persona.

So what if, as The Right Stuff showed, behind the scenes, the early astronauts were as testosterone-fueled as any other group of American males?

Well, with the space project potentially poised to gear up for a mission to Mars -- President Bush proposed such a venture in his 2006 State Of The Union Address -- NASA's old-fashioned astronaut-selection criteria is looking like it's ready for the scrap heap.

The reason? As Popular Mechanics points out in a fascinating post, a trip to Mars will take about 30 months. In such close-quarters situations, the post notes, "the attributes that make someone a successful astronaut for brief shuttle missions may in some cases be exactly the wrong attributes for extended missions."

Indeed, the thinking is that married couples, or some other set-up where astronauts aren't put in a situation that'll put everybody at each others' throats, might be the way to go.

As The New York Times puts it, in their article on the Lisa Nowak incident, "An astronaut's life can stretch family ties to the breaking point, and astronauts are not immune to emotional stress."

Perhaps the Nowak case doesn't spotlight anything. Beyond the intense stress of an astronaut's life, or other personal demons, maybe she's just--can I say it?--nuts. Regardless, unless we're planning on putting astronauts into deep hibernation for long trips (q.v., 2001: A Space Odyssey, the days of outwardly high achievement as the be-all and end-all of NASA's selection criteria should be over.

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