posted on Friday, July 27, 2007 4:14 PM
by
Lou Michels
Looking for Love in All the Wrong Places II
In The Right Stuff , Tom Wolfe described the early NASA culture, which was centered heavily around military fighter pilots, as one of "drinking and flying, flying and drinking". As NASA, and its astronauts aged, and as the organization began using astronauts from a wider variety of corporate and military cultures, that image began to fade. It was hard to imagine some of the more recent NASA shuttle commanders, who are in their 50s and in some cases 60s, out carousing around when they weren't practicing zero-g activities.
But the more things change, the more they stay the same. An internal review of the astronaut corps following the Lisa Novak attempted murder/attempted kidnapping/attempted "I just want to talk" episode alleges that on at least two occasions astronauts were allowed to fly when they were impaired by recent alcohol consumption and that there was heavy use of alcohol among the astronaut group before launches. "Heavy use" involves imbibing within 12 hours of lift off.
Yikes! I thought these people were completely sequestered for longer than that prior to a shuttle mission. Now I have this image of our nation's finest swinging by the Beverage Depot and picking up a few bottles on their drive out to the launch pad. And who in the pre-launch inspection team thought it was a good idea to have someone with any alcohol in their system on the crew?
Most of my employer clients would terminate any of their managers under the influence on the job. That goes double (triple? quadruple?) for people managing more than $1 billion worth of technology in a highly public, highly dangerous type of activity. All of a sudden the Nowak love triangle situation starts to get a little more contextualized.
These types of problems almost always go back to a failure of professionalism within the ranks. I'm sure that the NASA leadership assumed that the high quality type of person they were drafting in their application and selection process would not have to be told that it was not only improper, but a termination offense to break up each other's marriages, get drunk before flying a mission, and generally act like frat and sorority members on the government's nickel. I'm sure NASA leadership assumed that it was unnecessary to track and check for this type of behavior, and that any actual incidents were simply an aberration.
They were wrong.