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Out of This World

Originally posted Thursday February 08, 2007 12:00 PM EST

NASA put Nowak (being led out of court Feb. 6) on 30-day leave and removed her from flight status and mission-related activities. "She's just an all-round sweet, good person," says her close friend Dennis Alloy, 43. "This is just so bizarre." Photo by: SCOTT AUDETTE / REUTER / Landov

Aboard Discovery, Nowak was in charge of robotic operations, supervising groundbreaking experiments with spacewalking robots. Her performance during the 13-day mission, says Johnson Space Center's Doug Peterson, "was excellent." Once back home, however, Nowak's attraction to Bill Oefelein spiraled out of control. Stephen Harrigan, an Austin-based writer who spent one year interviewing female astronauts for his novel Challenger Park, says they face unique pressures. "They are thrust together with other people in a very bonding way for many, many hours every day," says Harrigan. "The female astronaut, with a family and children, is really pushed to the wall." Still, says Harrigan, what Nowak did "is not typical or normal. But you can see how the pressure cooker of training for missions and being in that intense environment could lead a person into strange new territory."

While prosecutors sort out the charges against Nowak, NASA officials are deciding how to handle what happened. "Our primary concern is Lisa's health and well-being," said NASA's Chief of Astronauts Corps, Col. Steve Lindsey, who trained with Nowak and traveled to Orlando to be with her shortly after her arrest. "We're a close family, and we try to take care of our own." Lindsey, like everyone who knows Lisa Nowak, is facing a struggle to make some sense of the sad, strange turn her life has taken. "For someone who had the ability to do whatever she wanted, who had so much more to give to the world," says her old friend Mike Haggerty, "this is just unfathomable."

• By Alex Tresniowski. Rose Ellen O'Connor in Rockville, Jeff Truesdell and Steve Helling in Orlando, Alicia Dennis in Austin, Wendy Grossman in Houston and John Perra in New York City