Lit Up For Liftoff – The Post
If you have read The Right Stuff by Tom Wolfe, you know that drinking was a big part of the early astronauts’ culture. When I heard that two NASA astronauts were drunk on the job, I assumed it was from either the Mercury or Gemini days. I don’t recall it being specifically mentioned to happen during the shuttle era.
Columnist Charles Krauthammer thinks the brew-ha-ha about drunk astronauts isn’t a big deal and takes it upon himself to defend them:
Have you ever been to the shuttle launch pad? Have you ever seen that beautiful and preposterous thing the astronauts ride? Imagine it’s you sitting on top of a 12-story winged tube bolted to a gigantic canister filled with 2 million liters of liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen. Then picture your own buddies — the “closeout crew” — who met you at the pad, fastened your emergency chute, strapped you into your launch seat, sealed the hatch and waved smiling to you through the window. Having left you lashed to what is the largest bomb on planet Earth, they then proceed 200 feet down the elevator and drive not one, not two, but three miles away to watch as the button is pressed that lights the candle that ignites the fuel that blows you into space.
Three miles! That’s how far they calculate they must go to be beyond the radius of incineration should anything go awry on the launch pad on which, I remind you, these insanely brave people are sitting. Would you not want to be a bit soused? Would you be all aflutter if you discovered that a couple of astronauts — out of dozens — were mildly so? I dare say that if the standards of today’s fussy flight surgeons had been applied to pilots showing up for morning duty in the Battle of Britain, the signs in Piccadilly would today be in German.
…And by the time the astronauts get to the part of the journey that requires delicate and skillful maneuvering — docking with the international space station, outdoor plumbing repairs in zero-G — they will long ago have peed the demon rum into their recycling units.
Obviously, no one would recommend this as a best practice for working in a billion dollar piece of government equipment or even filing your TPS reports. When you get a bunch of former test pilots involved though, these things can happen.
I’m guessing Gordo Cooper was one of them and maybe Alan Shepherd was too, but later in his career. About 15 years ago, my brother personally verified that Shepherd liked to imbibe.
