Washington – NASA’s safety chief said Wednesday that he could find no evidence of heavy drinking by astronauts before space launches – undermining but not wholly dismissing reports from an independent panel on astronaut health issues that said last month that at least two such incidents had come to its attention.
“I was unable to verify any case in which an astronaut spaceflight crew member was impaired on launch day,” safety chief Bryan D. O’Connor wrote in the executive summary of his 34-page report. He also said he could find no cases in which a manager disregarded a recommendation by a flight surgeon or other astronaut that a drunken crew member should not fly.
National Aeronautics and Space Administration Administrator Michael Griffin said during a news briefing that he had done all he could to get to the bottom of the allegations of astronaut drinking and said he “couldn’t find it.”
“I just don’t believe the stories are true,” Griffin said.
The review by O’Connor, a former astronaut and shuttle accident investigator, went back 20 years and included interviews with 90 astronauts, flight surgeons and other NASA officials. His report included an e-mail signed by 20 flight surgeons saying they had never seen any drunken behavior by astronauts before a launch or training flight.
Nonetheless, the report did not rule out the possibility that such incidents had occurred. The earlier panel had said that the two episodes of alleged drunkenness were troubling but unsubstantiated, and it did not reveal the names of its sources.
In Wednesday’s report, O’Connor said that he had not spoken with the sources of the original information.
