The Drunk Astronauts

Color me nonplussed at the news that these folks may have been known to hit the bottle before heading out to the launch pad.

One well-known trivia item about military history is that soldiers, from at least the time of the Roman legions, often bolstered their enthusiasm for grisly death on the battlefield with booze or anything else at hand. And marijuana, of course, became popular in Vietnam.

If I were tending my acre of potatoes in the hills of Ireland one day, and somebody forcibly conscripted me into an army and told me I was being sent to the Ottoman Empire to run towards spikes and impale myself in the name of Christendom – well, I’d bring along a nip of whiskey.

Many of our astronauts come out of a modern, military tradition – which doesn’t officially condone any kind of self-medication, of course. And reasonably so – we have forked over several billion taxpayer dollars for the hardware involved in spaceflight. The 12-hour "bottle-to-throttle" rule cited in the news article seems like a good idea - although it's rather telling that something that might seem obvious has earned a little catchphrase.

The fact remains we're asking these people to do something incredibly dangerous. Space shuttles have a expected, engineered failure rate of 1%. Imagine if the computer you used at the office everyday blew up and killed seven people about once every 100 times you flipped it on. Spaceflight should become more reliable - vigorous private competition in aerospace may eventually bring down cost. But as the other recent news item reminds us, it's still a pursuit that inherently involves extreme risk. It simply takes a phenomenal amount of energy to escape gravity, and it can only be obtained by a barely-controlled explosion.

At the end of the day we're still human beings, striving for something, despite the sophisticated hardware. No rigorous selection process can entirely filter out the fears and weaknesses that come built-in to our natures alongside courage and ingenuity.