Scandal At NASA

By now everyone has probably heard about the NASA woman astronaut who drove from JSC, in Houston, to KSC, at Cape Canaveral, to assault another woman astronaut, supposedly because of a third, male astronaut. I've known a lot of astronauts, test pilots, and military pilots in my career and I have to tell you that this is really weird.

I mean, no one gets to be a captain in the Navy, a fighter pilot, and a test pilot, much less an astronaut, as this woman has, by being unstable. Obviously, I don't know what happened to her, but I'm pretty sure that after the psychologists and psychiatrists get done figuring it out, they're going to use a lot of Latin- and Greek-based words to tell us she flipped out big-time.

Of course, NASA has reacted to all of this scandal by a) standing behind their astronaut, b) suspending her for thirty days, and c) promising to examine and tighten up the psychological tests they give to aspiring astronauts. The last is about as stupid as NASA gets. There is no magical "astronaut profile" that they can define and measure with all their tests and they're kidding themselves if they think there is.

I'm not saying that any of the astronauts are crazy, mind you, but some of them are a little odd. Sort of like management, if you know what I mean. NASA doesn't give would-be managers a battery of psychological tests before promoting them, though. Maybe they should start....