Opinion: Booze rumors still driving Shuttle commander astro-nuts
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If you read our recent Primary Source with the crew of the Space Shuttle Endeavor, you may recollect that mission commander Scott Kelly expressed some pretty heavy criticism of the media for what he considered an unnecessary focus on rumors of astronaut pre-launch drinking:
Tim: We’re in this period where there have been, I know the whole drinking-before-spaceflight story fell apart, but there was the kidnap-astronaut story. Where are we now in terms of the reputation of astronauts, you know, kids looking up to astronauts, all that sort of thing? Scott: You know, there was a lot of media attention on that particular case, and if you read the report, and looked at some of the articles and watched some of the television news programs that were dedicated to this report, it was clear that some of the people didn’t even read the report that were putting these very, very brazen headlines about, you know: Shuttle pilots flying drunk. I thought it was very, very irresponsible. And if you actually dug into the details of this, this was apparently one person giving — and it’s kind of questionable whether this was one person’s account to one member of this board or one person’s account to three members of the board, but it was an account, this whole astronaut-drinking thing was an account of one person’s opinion, basically, unsubstantiated. There was no evidence that this ever occurred, there was no... And you know the board was critical of the fact that when NASA went back and did their own investigation, it wasn’t really an anonymous thing, an anonymous system to raise this issue. We have had in place an anonymous reporting system for years. Many, many years. And there’s never been one case of even one person mentioning anything like this. You’d think if someone would have had this concern it would have been raised in either, you know, a public manner, or in an anonymous manner. It never was, and I think there’s a big story in how the press in this particular case has been, you know, just gone right for the headlines that would attract the most attention without doing any of the investigative reporting. Tim: Isn’t part of that story that if this had happened in 1967 instead of 2007 the press wouldn’t have done that, that there’s actually, that the mystique of astronauts isn’t what it used to be? Scott: I didn’t read any story that mentioned that. That mentioned this kind of comparison between now and then. Tim: No, I just mentioned it... Scott: Yeah. You said part of this story was this comparison. I didn’t... Tim: You said the story is that the press screwed it up. I’m saying part of the issue is that press is less deferential, maybe to everybody... Scott: And maybe even to the truth.
Strong stuff! And Kelly’s still hotter than a Redstone booster over this business. From an AP story today:
‘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.’
In fairness, I find it very easy to believe that the drinking-astronaut story was a bunch of horse puckey, and in fact said as much in my shillyshallying preamble. But there’s something more going on here. It doesn’t really come across in the transcript, but Kelly was seriously seething about the media’s treatment of NASA. As I spend a lot of time with the Far Out Space Nuts, whose central obsession is that the media are far too credulous and deferential in accepting NASA’s self-glorifying story of space exploration, this strikes me as odd. I asked Kelly to write us a fiery media-bashing OpEd, and he assured me he’d do so with the kind of force and enthusiasm that nearly always indicates the writer won’t deliver. (He hasn’t so far, but I’d still love to get his thoughts into the paper.)
But I think the problem here, which like most such problems, isn’t really a problem, is as old as the ‘Deep Space Homer’ episode of The Simpsons. The public just isn’t very interested in astronauts anymore. You’d think an astronaut in 2007 would have made his peace with that truth already, though I can understand the disappointment in working extraordinarily hard to get to a highly coveted position only to find that the position doesn’t command much respect anymore. Then again, things are tough all over. They used to make movies about heroic journalists, believe it or not.