NASA said Wednesday that it had found no evidence that any of its astronauts ever flew while inebriated, or even showed up for work impaired, as was recently alleged by an outside investigative panel.
In particular, Administrator Michael D. Griffin said a sensational account of an unnamed astronaut flying drunk on a Russian Soyuz flight was false.
"I'm saying I think our guys are doing a heck of a job, and these allegations are untrue," Griffin said at a briefing in Washington.
Griffin's remarks came with the release of a 45-page internal review of the much-publicized allegations, made last month by a panel that criticized the culture of NASA's astronaut corps in the wake of the Lisa Marie Nowak case.
Nowak, a space shuttle astronaut, was arrested this year in Orlando, Fla., and accused of stalking and attacking a rival for the affections of a male astronaut. This week she announced plans to mount an insanity defense.
As a result of Nowak's arrest, Griffin asked an outside panel to look into astronaut health and safety issues to see whether NASA should be doing more to make sure its astronauts were not going into space suffering from debilitating mental or physical problems.
The panel, citing anonymous reports, identified "some episodes of heavy use of alcohol by astronauts in the immediate preflight period."
The report cited two instances of alcohol abuse before flights, one in Kazakhstan in central Asia.
The report issued Wednesday was directed by NASA safety officer Bryan O'Connor, who said he reviewed tens of thousands of pages of documents and consulted scores of former and current astronauts and flight surgeons going back 20 years.
"I was unable to verify any case in which an astronaut spaceflight crew member was impaired on launch," O'Connor said in the report. Neither could he find a case in which a manager disregarded warnings from another NASA employee that an astronaut should not be allowed to fly.
Twenty flight surgeons signed an e-mail to O'Connor saying they had never seen an astronaut drunk before a launch or a flight on a training jet.
O'Connor's review included an inspection of crew quarters in Houston and Cape Canaveral in Florida before the launch of the shuttle Endeavour this month, when the seven astronaut crew members were in quarantine.
He found a half-empty bottle of tequila in a cupboard. Beer and wine are sometimes brought in by nonflying astronauts, he said.
