CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — This weekend as the seven astronauts relax before Tuesday’s blastoff into space, the beer will be cold and waiting at crew quarters at Kennedy Space Center.
No one will monitor how much they drink, no breath tests given.
“We’re all professionals,” says Scott Kelly, commander of the last space shuttle mission in August.
While the outside world was aghast at a medical report a few months ago suggesting two cases of drunkenness just before launch, the men and women who fly NASA’s space shuttles are indignant.
“It’s just such an absurd thing to think that someone would even do that,” said Kelly, a Navy commander. “I don’t have the words to describe how ridiculous this whole thing is.”
He and others agree there’s no harm in having a beer a day or two out, and he did just that. During the three days before liftoff, the shuttle crew is in semi-isolation at dorm-style quarters or at the beach house where astronauts enjoy barbecues with their spouses.
Kelly’s co-pilot, Charles Hobaugh, a burly Marine colonel, readily admits he’s no teetotaler. But he says that coming into launch, his drink of choice is skim milk.
Their mission came just over a week after the controversial report by a special medical panel that mentioned inebriated astronauts, citing interviews with unnamed sources.
Peggy Whitson, who recently arrived on the international space station as commander, also has found herself treading carefully.
The drinking issue weighed heavily on her mind before her Oct. 10 launch aboard a Soyuz rocket from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, where preflight toasting is the norm. She said it was “interesting” navigating between the U.S. and Russian cultural differences.
“We don’t want people to have an image of us as being a bunch of drunks,” she said earlier this week.
NASA’s long-standing rule — unwritten but universally understood — is that alcohol is forbidden within 12 hours of a launch. No one denies that until then, “alcohol is freely used in crew quarters,” as the astronaut health panel stated in its report. It based its findings on astronauts and flight surgeons who were promised anonymity.
There still is no conclusive evidence that astronauts, at Cape Canaveral or on Soyuz flights from Kazakhstan, were intoxicated right before launch.
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