NASA has reviewed 10 years of space flights and found no evidence to back up allegations that astronauts boarded a space shuttle and a Russian Soyuz spacecraft drunk, the US space agency’s boss said on Wednesday.
The agency was investigating every flight involving shuttles, the Soyuz and the T-38 trainer jets flown by astronauts, NASA Administrator Michael Griffin told reporters.
“Right now, we’ve gone back 10 years and we can’t even find where it would be a possibility there was crew under the influence on either a Soyuz or a shuttle,” he said.
The claim emerged last month in a report by a panel of health experts who had been asked to check on the astronaut corps’ health and screening policies in the aftermath of the arrest of a former astronaut, Lisa Nowak, accused of stalking a love rival.