Bubble pops for love-sick astronaut. I’m sure it happens every day. I know it happens in the Air Force (and, in fact, wrote a novel, called The Art of Uncontrolled Flight, all about how it happens). Maybe it’s the long hours away from home, or the risk inherent in the work, or the feeling of power that comes from having the word “astronaut” on your resume. Employer: NASA. Maybe you feel invincible. The normal rules suddenly seem irrelevant. And what could be more romantic than circling the earth with the man you love? Setting the new record for the “mile-high” club. In that light, can you blame Captain Lisa Nowak for trying to discourage a would-be rival? Anyone standing in the way of that dream deserves a good pepper spray.

In truth, I feel awful for Nowak’s kids. How do they absorb this? A woman driving all night in diapers with a can of pepper spray and a steel mallet so she can presumably attack the would-be lover of her own would-be lover—this woman who is so not their mother. This woman who looks like their mother and answers to her name but is really someone they’ve never met.

Maybe the guy, Navy Commander Bill Oefelein, is also starting to wonder if he really knows her. What does he think? A woman with whom he had (in her words) “more than a professional relationship and less than a romantic relationship” drives 1000 miles to attack another woman 13 years and 3 grades of rank her junior (a Navy captain is the equivalent of an Air Force colonel) out of jealousy. Maybe he thinks, this is my kind of woman. Or maybe he thinks, I didn’t think she’d really do it. Or: if I ever get out of this, I will never so much as look at another woman again. Or maybe next time, he’ll just stick to the girls at the officers' club.

Another Icarus has fallen. But if there is a lesson in this, I’m not sure what it is.