Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Not all heroes wear capes.

After roe, women are no longer free.

Wow, you are pre-disappointed. How surprising.

Since when do we limit our critiques to things we could do better ourselves?

Some judge needs to shut this circus down soon.

Impressively dumb. Congratulations.

This fight is for everything.

Come on, man.

Let’s finish the job.

Nothing worth doing is easy.

Come on, media. you have one job. start doing it.

Just because you believe it, that doesn’t make it true.

Let there be snark.

Within six months Twitter will be fully self-driving.

Give the craziest people you know everything they want and hope they don’t ask for more? Great plan.

Consistently wrong since 2002

Second rate reporter says what?

Accountability, motherfuckers.

It may be funny to you motherfucker, but it’s not funny to me.

Imperialist aggressors must be defeated, or the whole world loses.

Infrastructure week. at last.

Let us savor the impending downfall of lawless scoundrels who richly deserve the trouble barreling their way.

Republicans seem to think life begins at the candlelight dinner the night before.

The next time the wall street journal editorial board speaks the truth will be the first.

You are here: Home / Open Threads / Late Night Open Thread: Space Crime!

Late Night Open Thread: Space Crime!

by | 13 Comments

This post is in: , , ,

Good quip, but of course it’s not really about money. Where there are primates, there are sexual relationships; and where there are sexual relationships, there are messy breakups, with the related financial complications. This is certainly not the first relationship to be broken by the rigors of astronautical travel, and I personally suspect it’s not even the first one involving accusations of related financial impropriety:

… Astronaut Anne McClain is accused of identity theft and improperly accessing her estranged wife’s private financial records while on a sixth-month mission aboard the International Space Station (ISS), the Times said.

The astronaut’s spouse Summer Worden filed a complaint earlier this year with the Federal Trade Commission after learning McClain had accessed her bank account without permission, while Worden’s family filed another with NASA’s Office of Inspector General, according to the newspaper.

McClain’s lawyer said the astronaut had done nothing wrong and accessed the bank records while aboard the ISS in order to monitor the couple’s combined finances — something she had done over the course of their relationship, the Times reported…

McClain, who returned to Earth in June, gained fame for being one of two women picked for a historic all-female spacewalk, but NASA scrapped the planned walk in March due to a lack of well-fitting spacesuits, sparking accusations of sexism…

Of course, IMO the Musk / Bezos et al rocketeering isn’t really about finance, either: Those guys are the tech-advantaged version of Jane Goodall’s Gombe Mike, the chimp who discovered he could compensate for his relatively puny physique by banging around empty oil drums to make a REALLY BIG NOISE…

Reader Interactions

13Comments

  1. 1.

    Chetan Murthy

    I feel compelled to note that we’ve come a long way as a nation, when certain aspects of this case are simply unnecessary to recount, b/c too banal. Love it!

  2. 2.

    Brachiator

    I hope that Anne McClain doesn’t try to make a run for it. Trump will want to send Space Force after her.

  4. 4.

    Amir Khalid

    Seriously, this is just crime on a personal level. The real excitement will come with organised crime in space: when there’s enough legit business going on out there for the mob to decide it wants a taste.

  6. 6.

    sukabi

    @Amir Khalid: the real / first crime comes prior to the actual launch into space — the padding / inflating the costs to build and prepare for the trips. You know there’s money to be bilked, or they wouldn’t do it.

  7. 7.

    montanareddog

    May be of interest to Adam and a couple of other jackals: I see from Anne McClain’s Wikipedia page that she was a top-level Rugby player, too.

  8. 8.

    Matt McIrvin

    It reminds me of the way early cyberpunk fiction portrayed computer crime as this exciting futuristic thriller action among a sort of romanticized demimonde in a video game-like environment, rather than just a mundane pain in the ass perpetrated by gross people.

    I remember reading one story in which criminals get revenge against a guy by putting his face in what we’d call deepfake porn. That was the whole story. These things come true and they stop being all that interesting.

  9. 9.

    David Evans

    Those guys are the tech-advantaged version….

    The next time an asteroid is on course to actually hit us we may be very grateful that someone wanted to develop really big rockets, irrespective of their alleged motives.

  11. 11.

    germy

    A new movie coming out, “Lucy In The Sky” starring Natalie Portman:

    An astronaut returns to Earth after a lengthy mission and begins an affair with a fellow astronaut. She heads into a downward spiral as she loses her connection to her family, and when her lover begins another affair with an astronaut trainee, the bottom drops out.

    The film is loosely based on astronaut Lisa Nowak’s criminal activities around her romantic involvement with fellow astronaut William Oefelein.

  12. 12.

    different-church-lady

    @Matt McIrvin: I keep saying: society today is like a bunch of clever found a stash of dystopian sci-fi novels from the 50s and said, “Yeah, let’s totally do that!“

Comments are closed.