Lust in Space (2007)

At your urging, I read it. I knew nothing of this event in 2007. I have no interest in reading about people having terrible mental breakdowns when their love life spirals out of control. Why would you want to pry into this person's life? Because they were once famous? Is it really your business to have an opinion one way or another? Was this ever really news to begin with? Just because the person in question was once famous?

Maybe I'm being too hard. I've been the subject of the rumour mill before. At one point I was virtually the only foreign person that lived in the small town in Japan where I taught English (there are hundreds now -- really hard to believe). Every step I took was seen by someone. If I went out on a date, it was common knowledge to people I'd never even met. If I broke up with someone, there were people debating whose fault it was. They had never spoken a word to me in their life.

I'm pretty easy going and I know people are going to be people. They are going to talk about stuff. I get it. But, seriously: why are you urging people to read this? Why does it need to be dredged up again? So that people can get a better view? So that they can have empathy -- with a person they have never met? A person that they will almost certainly never meet?

I mean it's one thing if the person themselves had written a story about it and encouraged people to read it. Or even collaborated with the author. Or even responded to questions from the author. I get absolutely no impression that this person wants people to revisit this episode of their life. Why are you making that decision for them? Why do you suppose it is your right? Because they were once famous? Because you knew their name and decided that you wanted to know more?

I'm sorry to be so hard here, but if you want to be empathetic, just remember that a person's life is the only thing they've really got. If you make a terrible, terrible mistake in public, it's not going to be erased, but you can make their life a lot easier: just forget about it.

The article itself however is much more compassionate towards Nowak and shows the extreme pressures she was under.

While the title is cruel the article itself is clear in describing the Astronaut as a human being under unthinkable pressure and stress and does in fact show empathy for her plight.

It seems to me that you're falling into a misconception of assuming that sentence is saying something it actually isn't. As I see it, the misconception is twofold: 1. assuming an intent without contextualising it with the rest of the piece; 2. reading it assuming a 2019 interpretation fit events that happened in 2007.

As for 1, the whole article tries to show there's more to the story than that astronaut being simply an "astronut". As for 2, we have now a distance to those events to ignore how things were being reported back then (the daily noise around the issue) — that sentence being a play with the common conception of the scandal and a hint on how the article tries to go against it (or at least complicate it further, adding many emotional layers).

So my conclusion is that your assessment is not valid and thus misleading.

The article goes into this in more depth later:

It would be unfair to say that no worthwhile science has been done on the station. Advances have been made in learning how humans react to long periods in space and in learning about technologies that work in zero gravity. “If you ask NASA what we’re doing on the space station,” says Robert Park, a professor of physics at the University of Maryland who is a longtime critic of the manned space program, “they say we are learning how to live in space. But it is not clear that we are learning anything new about how to live in space. We have been doing that for a long time, and there is nothing else going on. There is, for all practical purposes, zero research going on on the space station, and it was built as a scientific laboratory, which was preposterous in the first place.” There is wide consensus that space station science is, at best, minor science and, at worst, a rerun of the same antigravity and human physiology experiments that the Soviets were doing on the Mir space station in 1986.