I have long maintained – and let's face it, the lack of competition makes it hard to dispute – that the At the Drive-In classic "One-Armed Scissor" is the finest song ever written about an astronaut losing his shit on a space station and killing everything including himself. I did, however, assume that the subject matter was largely borne of an overactive imagination, too much sci-fi, and a hell of a lot of cocaine.
Apparently, either NASA does just as much cocaine or they listen to a lot of ATDI. They have taken Cedric's warning seriously enough to have developed a detailed plan for dealing with astro-psychos in space. Let's just say it involves a lot of duct tape (!!!!) and Haldol. Either NASA has very little confidence in its psychological screening procedures or there's something about being in space that they assume can crack just about anyone. They know something we don't! Solaris was not fiction!
"End transmission" indeed.
Christina says:
Well, considering that just recently they had one of their graduates drive cross-country in a diaper in order to kill a co-worker, maybe they shouldn't trust their psychological testing.
Ed says:
Not to mention that one of the Mercury Seven has insisted (since retiring in the 70s) that he saw UFOs and aliens.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gordon_Cooper#Later_years