Space Shuttle Commander Sick of Female Astronaut’s Back-Seat Driving

CAPE CANAVERAL – The U.S. Space Shuttle Endeavour was lost for hours on its return journey to Earth, and the pilot is placing the blame on his female co-pilot. “This trip was a nightmare,” said Commander Chris Ferguson. “She never shut up the whole time I was driving.”

Ferguson was referring to crew member Heidimarie Stefanyshyn-Piper. “Her non-stop nagging drove me nuts. Pass this asteroid. Get around this comet. Can’t this thing go any faster? Slow down, you’re making me nervous. Not to mention her constant fiddling with the temperature controls and the radio. I finally blew a gasket.”

Ferguson said that after hours of frustration behind the wheel, he asked Ms. Stefanyshyn-Piper if she wanted to drive. When she sat in stony silence, staring straight into the cosmos, he decided to get out of the shuttle and take a spacewalk to clear his head.

Ms. Stefanyshyn-Piper expressed her own frustrations about the experience. “I was only trying to help. I kept telling him, in as sweet a voice as I could muster, that I didn’t think we were going the right way. That things didn’t look familiar. That we didn’t pass this on the way out of Earth’s atmosphere. But he didn’t want to hear it. That’s how we touched down in the wrong place.”

Ferguson said when he initially landed the shuttle after sixteen days aloft, the forbidden, desolate landscape he observed made him think he had missed the Mojave Desert. “I thought we were in downtown Detroit. Turns out, we were on Mars.”

Both Ferguson and Stefanyshyn-Piper agreed this was their last space mission driving together. “Next time, we’re taking separate shuttles.”

Dec 3