More on Lisa Nowak, NASA's fallen star, and on our fall

It was inevitable, I suppose, that America's space bureaucracy would launch a study into the agency's psychological screening processes for astronaut selection after this week's arrest of Astronaut Lisa Nowak on charges of attempted murder. A story reported by AFP quotes NASA deputy administrator Shana Dale as saying the director of NASA's Johnson Space Center, Michael Coats, had been ordered to "initiate a review of existing psychological screening for admittance into the astronaut corps."

The article adds that Dale promised that NASA would also launch an investigation "into the existing process for carrying out psychological assessments during an astronaut's career."

If only NASA could launch spaceships with the same predictability and frequency.

The Lisa Nowak case is another illustration of the "Mom is Always Right" Rule. Your mother and my mother -- everyone's mother -- warned us: Idle hands are the Devil's playground.

Oh, Ms. Nowak surely had plenty of work to do: Committees and meetings and training and testing... for... what, exactly? To go into orbit on the obsolete Shuttle, the space truck, ferrying supplies to the International Space Station? It was work -- but it was not enough to keep Ms. Nowak occupied. She found other things to do.

Here's a news flash: Astronauts are volunteers. They signed up to take risks, not to take meetings. When astronauts are selected to lead America's space effort and then given jobs as bureaucrats -- even as bureaucrats who fly jet trainers in their spare time -- some of them will become frustrated. Some will leave the program. One, now, has apparently cracked under the strain of the contradiction.

I am not a risk taker. I wouldn't even ride a roller coaster on a bet. If I didn't blog so much, I might even make an acceptable bureaucrat. But I say to each their own. Let the astronauts take their risks; let me cringe under my desk every time I hear a siren.

NASA was supposed to get us into space. The agency seems more adept at keeping us out. Frankly, by this time in my life, having grown up with Mercury, Gemini and Apollo, I had hoped that some parts of outer space would already be safe enough for non-risk takers like me. I thought I might someday be a tourist. And I thought it would happen because of the willingness of the Captain Nowaks of the world to blaze the trails for the rest of us.

NASA perhaps is just reflective of our culture: We have become so risk averse, we can't take risks for ourselves -- and we can't let anyone else take risks either. Any risks.

Some illustrations: Many people use cell phones while driving. Certainly we've all seen driving cell phone users who pose a menace to navigation. Because they overuse them. Because they become... distracted. So instead of cracking down on distracted drivers, many cities -- Chicago among them -- have banned everyone from using cell phones while driving.

Now, State Sen. Carl Kruger of Brooklyn, New York, proposes a ban on using cell phones, BlackBerries, iPods, or other electronic devices while crossing a street in New York City because a few people -- in the throes of so-called "iPod oblivion" -- have been injured or killed, walking into a street without paying attention.

Zay N. Smith, in this morning's Quick Takes column in the Chicago Sun-Times reports today that, "Organizers of the annual festival in Hartlepool, England, citing risk assessments, will no longer allow sack races, three-legged races or egg-and-spoon races." Our grandparents were lucky to survive!

And speaking of survival, did your kids survive their rides in grocery carts? Didn't you? Does your family take sick each and every week because of those pesky bacteria lurking from the last unclean users of your shopping cart? Nevertheless, Arkansas is poised to enact a law that will, according to the linked ABC News story, "push grocery stores to provide sanitation wipes at the door so customers don't have to wrap their hands around the last shopper's bacteria."

Let us not pause to assess the actual danger posed: No, researchers at the University of Arizona "found that shopping carts were loaded with more saliva, bacteria and even fecal matter than escalators, public telephones, and even public bathrooms." So let's all say "eeeeeeeeeewwwwwww" and do something about it, no matter how stupid or unnecessary -- or even dangerous.

Last June I did a piece on a news report about a couple of studies which demonstrated that clean living is making us sicker; that our society's unreasoning germ phobia "may be partly to blame for soaring rates of human allergy and asthma cases and some autoimmune diseases, such as Type I diabetes and rheumatoid arthritis." (The link is to my post; the Yahoo! News link therein has since expired.) When we try and cut ourselves off from contact with germs and bacteria we make ourselves weaker and more susceptible to illness in the process.

Just this week I did a post about the recall of nearly a million Easy Bake Ovens because five careless or unsupervised kids got burned.

One final example. Here is a picture of one of the 'devices' that shut down Boston on January 31:

Doesn't 'device' sound like a dangerous word? Oooooooooh. Scary.

I am also informed, from reading several articles, that the extended finger is believed to be a middle finger. Without that information, I might not have recognized that as a finger at all. Nevertheless, younger and more sensitive viewers are cautioned to avert their eyes as necessary.

Apparently someone in Boston thought that, if terrorists were going to plant bombs around a city, they would use bombs in a brightly lighted case depicting someone with middle finger pointed skyward.

Lest you think I've made this up, herewith a picture of the removal of one of the 'suspected terrorist devices':

As a society, we can assess risk to several decimal places -- but, as these illustrations show, we can't evaluate risk worth beans. NASA reflects that societal failing -- and it shouldn't. We need to let the smart people that NASA hires as astronauts determine levels of acceptable risk in space projects... and then really go where no one has gone before... so that we don't wind up, in wig and diaper, going to Orlando.