The United States space agency, Nasa, faced tough questions on Friday over a report that astronauts had shown up for duty drunk and also that workers found a sabotaged computer destined for an imminent mission.
The troubled Nasa planned to hold a news conference later on Friday to address the alarming report appearing in an industry magazine that astronauts had been allowed to fly spacecraft while drunk on at least two occasions.
According to Aviation Week & Space Technology, an internal Nasa panel found ”heavy use of alcohol” inside the standard 12-hour ”bottle to throttle” abstinence period for Nasa flight-crew members.
Nasa said that the agency would investigate the case further and confirmed an internal review included second-hand accounts of astronauts drinking before flights, the Washington Post reported on Friday.
”We take this and other parts of the reports very seriously and will look into it,” said spokesperson David Mould, quoted by the Post.
”But we need to verify the facts before we can know what the appropriate action might be,” he said.
Mould said details of the internal review would be released on Friday and that it was unclear if the reports of drinking referred to space-shuttle flights, test flights or other vehicles, the paper said.
There was more bad news for the space agency on Thursday when Nasa officials said workers found that a computer, due to be installed on the US space shuttle Endeavour for an August mission to the International Space Station, had been apparently sabotaged, with its wires cut.
”One of our subcontractors noticed that a network box for the shuttle had appeared to be tampered with,” Nasa spokesperson Katherine Trinidad said on Thursday. ”It is intentional damage to hardware.”
She said workers who discovered the computer damage at the subcontractor’s facility — not at Nasa’s — had notified the space agency ”several days ago”, adding: ”There is an ongoing investigation.”
She did not identify the subcontractors or offer more details.
”What we are trying to do now is repair that unit and try and fly it when possible,” she said.
But William Gerstenmaier, head of space operations at Nasa, told reporters on Thursday the device is not critical to the orbiting space station and if the damage had gone undetected it would not have posed a danger.
The shuttle Endeavour and a crew of seven were due for launch on August 7 from Nasa’s base at Cape Canaveral, Florida, for a mission to renew work on building the orbiting space laboratory.
Safety is a major concern in shuttle missions after damage sustained by the Columbia craft on launch caused it to break up on re-entry in February 2003, killing all seven astronauts on board.
Already under pressure over a range of issues, Nasa could face a full-blown crisis as US lawmakers focus on the account of allegedly drunken astronauts.
”If the reports of drunken astronauts being allowed to fly prove to be true, I think the agency will have a lot of explaining to do,” said Bart Gordon, chairperson of the House of Representatives’ science and technology committee.
”That’s not the ‘right stuff’ as far as I’m concerned,” he said, alluding to a 1983 film about early Nasa crews, The Right Stuff, based on Tom Wolfe’s 1979 book.
The internal Nasa panel was set up to review astronaut health after astronaut Lisa Nowak in February was arrested and charged with trying to kidnap a woman who was dating another astronaut. Nasa fired her in March.
Nasa suffered another setback in April, when contractor Bill Phillips sneaked a revolver past security at the Johnson Space Centre in Houston, Texas, and barricaded himself inside a building.
He duct-taped a female co-worker to a chair and shot a male colleague dead before turning the gun on himself.
The agency also faced political criticism in May when Nasa chief Michael Griffin drew fire for comments on the hot topic of harmful climate change. He publicly questioned the need to tackle global warming. — AFP
