July 26
A panel has found that astronauts were allowed to fly on at least two occasions despite warnings they were so drunk they posed a flight risk.

An independent panel set up by NASA to study astronaut health issues found evidence of "heavy use of alcohol" before launch that was within the standard 12-hour "bottle-to-throttle" rule. Flight surgeons and other astronauts warned that drunken astronauts posed a flight risk when they flew on the two known occasions.

"Astronauts used to get away with all manner of rule-breaking back in the 1980s and 1990s, when NASA top managers used the astronaut office as their auxiliary drinking team, baseball team and dating service," said a 22-year veteran of NASA's Mission Control. "That has largely been cleaned up under the last two administrators."

In the early days of the space program, when most astronauts came from the ranks of military test pilots, some of the fliers cultivated a bad-boy image — complete with womanizing, hard drinking and hard driving.

As time went on, the astronaut corps took on increasing numbers of women and put more emphasis on a button-down, straight-arrow stereotype. In the background, however, astronauts were still known to bend if not break the rules — sometimes with the collusion of flight surgeons who hoped to become astronauts themselves.
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It seems NASA's Administration are going to 'spin' this story into a way to boost their budget!!!

linky

I don,t agree with them getting drunk with all they are responsible for But i know if someone strapped me into a tin can with tons and tons of explosives under my butt,i wouldn,t want to be sober either! And thats why i,d never do that kind of job,i think you have to be a little crazy to do that willingly