Stability of Normal Bundles of Space Curves

In this paper, we prove that the normal bundle of a general Brill-Noether space curve of degree $d$ and genus $g\ge 2$ is stable if and only if $(d,g) \not\in { (5,2), (6,4) }$\mathrm{.}When$g\leq1$ and the characteristic of the ground field is zero, it is classical that the normal bundle is strictly semistable. We show that this fails in characteristic $2$ for all rational curves of even degree.