After February incident with an astronaut, Captain Lisa Marie Nowak, who was arrested for assault and kidnapping attempt, Michael Griffin, the NASA administrator, ordered a report. The report is based on anonymous interviews and investigates mentioned cases. The US House of Representatives Science will discuss the report during a hearing in September.
The investigation reported at least two cases of heavily drunk astronauts before flight launch. The report doesn’t mention neither the missions, nor astronaut names. It only says that astronauts had ‘heavy use of alcohol’ within a day before mission launch, which violates NASA's 12-hour ‘bottle to throttle’.
The worst thing is that flight surgeons and other members of crew have warned that the astronauts were drunk, but they were allowed to fly despite of the warnings.
The report said: "Interviews with both flight surgeons and astronauts identified some episodes of heavy use of alcohol by astronauts in the immediate preflight period, which has led to flight safety concerns. Alcohol is freely used in crew quarters. Two specific instances were described where astronauts had been so intoxicated prior to flight that flight surgeons and/or fellow astronauts raised concerns to local on-scene leadership regarding flight safety. However, the individuals were still permitted to fly. The medical certification of astronauts for flight duty is not structured to detect such episodes, nor is any medical surveillance program by itself likely to detect them or change the pattern of alcohol use. "
Flight surgeons are also concerned with NASA behavior to ignore their opinion about astronauts’ conditions. It is a very often case when flight surgeons advices are ignored without any ingle explanation.
"Instances were described where major crew medical or behavioral problems were identified to astronaut leadership and the medical advice was disregarded," the report said. "This disregard was described as 'demoralizing' to the point where they said they are less likely to report concerns of performance decrement. Crew members raised concerns regarding substandard astronaut task performance which were similarly disregarded."
Now Michael Griffin aims to change ‘NASA culture’, so that astronauts and flight surgeons can raise any flight safety issue. They must be very easy to communicate and be sure that their concerns will be considered. HULIQ
