Up, up and away….
Seems NASA is not having a good day. It was reported by Aviation Week & Space Technology this morning that a special panel studying astronaut health found that on two occasions, astronauts were allowed to fly after flight surgeons and other astronauts warned they were so drunk they posed a safety risk. The independent panel also found “heavy use of alcohol” before launch — within the standard 12-hour “bottle-to-throttle” rule, the magazine reported.
Seems like this has some NASA executives in an uproar and fearful of congressional hearings along with the much dreaded additional bad press. Of course you have to sympathize with their concerns due to information also released this morning about a computer sabotage incident and a previous arrest of another astronaut on assault charges related to a love triangle mess. While these are serious actions and definately deserve scruitny of whatever internal process NASA has in place, they can at least take pride in knowing that our finest aviators still are better behaved than most of our professional athletes.
All in all, though, I find it very amazing that all of our astronauts don’t have a little something to relax them before strapping themselves into a multi-ton space craft that sits on top of a couple of highly explosvie contraptions that hurl them up, up and away!
