This story was updated at 3:12 p.m.
EDT
A NASA investigation into two reports
that astronauts were drunk just before spaceflights has found no evidence that
the alleged incidents ever occurred, the U.S. space agency announced Wednesday.
The wide-reaching survey of NASA
records spanning the last two decades of shuttle flights yielded no
substantiated accounts that astronauts ever flew aircraft of spacecraft while
intoxicated, according to a 45-page report released today.
"Within
the scope and the limitations of this review, I was not able to verify any case
where an astronaut spaceflight crewmember was impaired on launch day" or
where managers disregarded safety concerns from mission managers, said NASA
safety chief Bryan O'Connor, who conducted the spaceflight safety review, in a
briefing at the agency's Washington, D.C. headquarters.
The review results come after
similar statements by NASA officials earlier
this month citing no accounts of alcohol abuse by spaceflyers within the
last decade of U.S. human spaceflight.
NASA launched the internal
investigation in July after an independent health panel reported two anecdotal
incidents of intoxicated astronauts who were later cleared to fly aircraft
or spacecraft despite safety concerns by flight surgeons or fellow spaceflyers.
One account reportedly involved an
astronaut who flew a NASA T-38 jet after a scrubbed shuttle launch attempt
earlier in the day, while the other centered on an astronaut that launched
toward the International Space Station (ISS) aboard a Soyuz spacecraft.
Both alleged incidents were reported
without dates, astronaut names or specific missions, leaving NASA to sift
through its own records to investigate the matter. Russia's Federal Space
Agency has denied that any incapacitated astronauts have launched aboard its
spacecraft.
"We felt that it was urgent to
get on top of these allegations of alcohol abuse because they, in fact, posed a
safety of flight issue if true," said NASA Administrator Michael Griffin during
the briefing.
NASA first called for an independent
study of its astronaut medical and behavioral health programs, as well as an
internal review, after the Feb. 5 arrest
of former U.S. astronaut Lisa Nowak in Orlando, Florida.
Police arrested Nowak at the Orlando
International Airport on charges of attempted kidnapping, battery and burglary
with assault after an alleged altercation with a romantic rival for the
affections of a former space shuttle pilot. Nowak, who was later dismissed
from NASA, has pleaded not guilty.
O'Connor did recommend that flight
surgeons should expand their launch day observations of astronauts to ensure
they are fit to fly. He also urged NASA to add "drinking to excess"
to the agency's list of high risk activities which spaceflyers should avoid
during the year before liftoff.
"I certainly feel badly that our astronauts' reputation
has been besmirched by this," Griffin said, adding that the
alcohol-related inquiry has overshadowed NASA's work to improve the behavioral
health support for its astronaut corps. "But I can't
avoid the knowledge that some news items are indeed sensational and we'll just
all have to deal with that."
Safety review
In his month-long spaceflight safety review, O'Connor
sifted through records of 94 shuttle missions and 10 Soyuz launches from 1987
to the present and included interviews with flight surgeons and at least one
crewmember from each of those flights. In all, he interviewed 90 astronauts, flight
surgeons, mission managers and space workers, and found no alcohol-related
complaints amid the agency's 40,134 mishap and close call records.
An analysis of the alleged
shuttle-related incident, which was narrowed to flights between 1990 and 1995,
turned up no evidence of alcohol abuse, O'Connor found. The Soyuz scenario,
meanwhile, reportedly involved an astronaut so drunk that a worried flight
surgeon stayed in the room overnight to ensure he didn't suffer an airway
obstruction, according to the NASA report.
"I can say categorically that
that anecdotal story did not happen," Griffin told reporters, adding that
the flight surgeon attributed to the account has refuted the story. "There
was not an impaired crewmember. There was not a flight surgeon who felt that he
or she had to stay with the crewmember…that did not happen."
O'Connor did
concede that medical privacy issues complicated his review of the Soyuz
allegation, but he stressed that at no point did he uncover a flight safety
issue related to alcohol use for during the Soyuz flights he surveyed.
Russian
space agency officials traditionally hold a champagne toast before Soyuz
launches, though the small amount of alcohol available during the ceremony has
proven little concern to NASA flight surgeons and non-drinkers are not
pressured to participate, O'Connor found.
Alcohol is freely available for
astronauts during off-duty hours in the spaceflight crew quarters at NASA's
Johnson Space Center in Houston, as well as the agency's Kennedy Space Center
launch site in Cape Canaveral, Florida, where spaceflyers are sequestered before
flight to avoid last-minute illnesses. But the high-profile and visibility of
astronauts from wake-up to liftoff on launch day makes it unlikely that
spaceflyer would jeopardize launch by becoming intoxicated, or be able to hide
any such impairment from others, O'Connor wrote.
Last month, NASA officially adopted
a no-drinking policy for astronauts within the 12-hour period before space
shuttle and Soyuz launches. An unofficial policy, based on NASA's T-38 training
aircraft flight guidelines, was already in place, but the new rules apply
directly to human spaceflight, NASA officials have said.
"I think the controls we have
in place for this sort of thing are very good and the probability of flying an impaired
astronaut is very low," said O'Connor, himself a former shuttle astronaut.
"In fact I couldn't even imagine it. I'd put it in the non-credible
category."
While O'Connor did find instances of
disagreements between mission operations and spaceflight medical teams, his
review found no evidence that the safety concerns of flight surgeons or
astronauts were disregarded as cited in the allegations, the NASA safety chief
wrote.
NASA's current flight surgeon corps
of 20 physicians overseeing astronauts also submitted a written statement
confirming that its members' safety concerns have never been disregarded in the
past, nor had they witnessed drunk astronauts during NASA shuttle, T-38 jet or
Russian Soyuz flight preparations.
"Should such a situation present
itself in the future, my review makes me confident that there are reasonable
safeguards in place to prevent an impaired crewmember from ever boarding a
spacecraft," O'Connor said.
advertisement
