NASA shaken by "drunk before flying" & sabotage stories: "There will be Congressional hearings"

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. - America's space agency was shaken Thursday by two startling and unrelated reports: One involved claims that astronauts were drunk before flying. The other was news from NASA itself that a worker had sabotaged a computer set for delivery to the international space station.

It was just another jolt for an operation that has had a rocky year from the start, beginning with the arrest of an astronaut accused of attacking a rival in a love triangle.

"It's going to shake up the world, I'll tell you that," retired NASA executive Seymour Himmel said of the latest news. "There will be congressional hearings that you will not be able to avoid."

News of the two latest bombshells broke within just a few hours of each other Thursday afternoon.

Aviation Week & Space Technology reported on its Web site 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....

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070727/ap_on_re_us/nasa_woes

...how about another story of our tax dollars at work and what value we're getting from our "employees"?

processed cheese in their spacecraft!

..how about another story of our tax dollars at work and what value we're getting from our "employees"?

to sit on top of a brazillion tons of explosives. They were just studying the effects of weightlessness on hangovers anyway.

:beer:

If I were in a tiny cabin perched aboard a gigantic missile ready to be launched by giant rockets into Earth orbit, knowing that I could end up looking like an enormous Fourth of July spectacle and having my insides sucked out in a vacuum before burning up in the atmosphere and having my remains spread across the coast of Florida, or even worse, having my body parts spilled across all of Texas.

But, hey, I'm funny like that. :spray:

I knew a LOT of AF pilots back in the day that would spend the first couple of minutes sucking down 100% oxygen to clear the cobwebs from the festivities the night before. This is nothing new, plus, you don't really "fly" the Shuttle anyway.