Love in Space and in Shakespeare's Works

While in space in December 2006, Commander Oefelein received an email form Capt Colleen Shipman, “I will have to control myself when I see you.  First urge will be to rip your clothes off . . .”—now you know why the astronaut has to wear special protective clothes : )

The space suit is designed to be torn-resistant and fire-resistant as passion is ‘hot’ (heat-producing and fire hazard)

NASA has been criticized not doing a good job in monitoring the mental health of astronauts.  In my view, NASA knows their astronauts better and is very ‘considerate’ in allowing the astronauts to receive emails from their ‘loved’ ones when they are in space.  And the names of the ‘loved’ ones have to be pre-approved by NASA.

For those who are puzzled how this astronauts space love triangle could have happened, take hint from the Preface of Shakespeare’s Works that Samuel Johnson wrote in 1765:

Upon every other stage the universal agent is love, by whose power all good and evil is distributed and every action quickened or retarded.  To bring a lover, a lady, and a rival into the fable; to entangle them in contradictory obligations, perplex them with oppositions of interest, and harass them with violence of desires inconsistent with each other; to make them meet in rapture and part in agony, to fill their mouths with hyperbolical joy and outrageous sorrow, to distress them as nothing human ever was distressed, to deliver them as nothing human ever was delivered, is the business of a modern dramatist.  For this, probability is violated, life is misrepresented, and language is depraved.