NASA started off 2007 with high hopes for the space program, but the past seven months have seen the agency's plans overshadowed by employees' tragedies and most recently awash in a sea of booze.
Inquiries into an attempted kidnapping, a murder and sabotage are continuing, while over the weekend an independent panel on astronaut health has sparked a row with the US' International Space Station partner Russia, with claims Russian astronauts drank heavily ahead of missions.
Female astronaut Lisa Nowak's infamous journey halfway across the United States in February to apparently try to abduct a love rival unofficially started off the headaches for NASA.
The crazy Nowak was stopped at Orlando International Airport - arrested and charged with crimes such as attempted kidnapping, attempted vehicle burglary, battery, attempted murder, and destruction of evidence.
She was barely out of the news by April when the agency suffered another setback, when contractor Bill Phillips sneaked a revolver past security at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas and shot a male colleague dead before turning the gun on himself.
The successful mission of shuttle Atlantis last month momentarily eroded some lingering doubts about NASA.
There was more bad news for the space agency last week when officials said workers had found a computer due to be transported by shuttle Endeavour in an August mission to the International Space Station had been apparently sabotaged, its wires cut.
"One of our subcontractors noticed that a network box for the shuttle had appeared to be tampered with," said spokeswoman Katherine Trinidad. "It is intentional damage to hardware."
She said the damage was being investigated. As yet it is unclear if it will delay Endeavour's planned August 7 launch for the International Space Station.
Against this backdrop of sabotage and murder an independent panel, set up to in the wake of Nowak's arrest, has uncovered a culture of alcohol-soaked machismo.
Last week it was revealed that NASA bosses let astronauts fly while under the influence of alcohol. Much to the shock of the independent investigation panel, the astronauts were so wasted that fellow astronauts and flight surgeons "raised concerns to local on-scene leadership regarding flight safety."
There are claims that an astronaut was intoxicated during a flight on a Russian Soyuz spacecraft - and a different astronaut was not stopped before flying on a NASA shuttle.
The claim about the Russian astronaut received a harsh response from Moscow on Saturday with Russian space agency spokesman Igor Panarin declaring: "We categorically deny that this could have happened."
But his words are in contrast to Russia's own past regulations. Astronauts were allowed to drink on the now-abandoned Mir space station and former astronaut Alexander Poleshchuk boasted to reporters about removing panels to hunt for bottles of cognac hidden by previous tenants.
NASA's own report into astronaut's health, released last week, found there was "heavy use of alcohol" inside the standard 12-hour "bottle to throttle" abstinence period for flight crew before a shuttle launch.
With no formal code of astronaut conduct and no official, written ban on alcohol, it appears poor behavior was simply overlooked. NASA hopes to change that culture - but the agency up against almost 50 years of tradition when it comes to astronaut drinking and unruly behavior. Ever since the seven original Mercury astronauts were selected in 1959, the stereotype has been a cocky but competent pilot who works and plays hard - a flyboy.
Source: China Daily/agencies
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