A panel reviewing astronaut health issues in the wake of the Lisa Nowak arrest has found that on at least two occasions astronauts were allowed to fly after flight surgeons and other astronauts warned they were so intoxicated that they posed a flight-safety risk.
Of course what this story does is it blasts a big gaping hole into the crowd that has been saying for years that "regular people can't go into space... People aren't fit enough! NASA wouldn't have the screening process it has for nothing."
I've always suspected that line of argument is bogus. NASA's astronaut selection process has always seemed to me to based on somewhat arbitrary requirements that seem to serve more the cause of filtering people out than in finding the most qualified candidates. A full 1,000 people apply to be astronauts every year. They're lucky if one of them joins the Astronaut Corps.
If NASA is willing to put drunks on the shuttle it makes you wonder whether there are a lot more of that 1,000 that could really have been strapped to the side of rocket just as well as anyone else.
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