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The report by a panel studying stress in the astronaut corps mentioned only a couple of drunks. The boozers were not named. They were not said to have hit the bottle while in space. Apparently, they merely imbibed late enough and heavily enough the night before that alcohol was still in their system during liftoff. The suspect missions were not identified nor were the dates of the supposed infraction of the twelve-hour so-called bottle-to-throttle rule. All in all this was a thoroughly nebulous basis for the Story of the Day--yet such is the abiding appeal of NASA's space program that such unverified scraps of information qualified as the lead item on all three networks.

The information that came closest to granting gravitas to this story was the line in the 12-page report quoted by CBS' Byron Pitts: "Astronauts had been so intoxicated prior to flight that flight surgeons and their fellow astronauts raised concerns to local on-scene leadership regarding flight safety." Apart from that the story seemed hyped. Even though the report offered "no names, dates or hard evidence," as ABC's Mike von Fremd pointed out, he still claimed without explanation that the heavy drinking occurred "before crucial missions." NBC's Don Teague called the report's findings "troubling" and used a clip from the Hollywood movie The Right Stuff to back up his assertion that "even from the early years NASA's astronauts have been portrayed as hard-partying space cowboys."

CBS' in-house space consultant Bill Harwood (no link) told anchor Katie Couric that he has "never heard even a whisper" of "an inebriated astronaut actually getting on a Space Shuttle--a claim that was validated by NBC's Teague, who reported that the two liftoffs in question involved a Russian Soyuz spacecraft and a T-38 training jet.

Andrew Tyndall 8/5/07 1:31:00 pm

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