Astronaut Lisa Nowak was formally charged with attempted kidnapping today for that little cross-country drive and assault stunt she pulled on a romantic rival. (Florida prosecutors have “declined to file an attempted murder charge [as] recommended by police”; apparently, when she pled not guilty a couple weeks back, it was not “not guilty to attempted murder” as I wrote, but not guilty “on all counts that police recommended.” I’ve never heard of that one before. Come to think of it, I’ve never heard of anyone entering any kind of plea before being actually charged. This case just keeps getting weirder…)

Also, in a related development, prosecutors have released e-mail exchanges made between astronaut Bill Oefelein, the object of Nowak’s obsession, and her apparent rival in this triangle, Colleen Shipman. Copies of these messages were found in Nowak’s possession, and there’s speculation that reading them led to her breakdown. There’s a news story on the e-mails here, and ABC News is publishing the text of some of them here, if you’re feeling especially voyeuristic.

I recognize that my interest in these gory details may be more than a little hypocritical given my recent diatribe about our gossipy media, but I find all this sex-and-madness-among-astronauts fascinating. When I was growing up, idolizing the Apollo veterans and the very first shuttle pilots, I saw them as perfect beings made of white marble. Later, when shuttle flights seemed to become routine, the astronauts didn’t become people in my eyes; they became anonymous, little more than interchangeable spacecraft components. Except those who died on Challenger and Columbia, of course — they were martyrs. But now we have red-blooded, 100% human astronauts floating right in front of us, doing all the nasty, mundane, boring, horrifying, and exalting things everybody else does. And ugly as the scene may be, as intrusive and unwelcome as my gaze probably is for Nowak, Shipman, and Oefelin, I find that I can’t look away…