Good lord.  What a bad year for NASA. First astronaut Lisa Nowak goes non-linear in a fit of lunacy that even National Lampoon would claim is over the top. Now there is talk of sabotage and drunken astronauts. 

Intrepid, hard drinking stick and rudder aviators have long been part of the lore of flight. Remember the Happy Bottom Riding Club? The image of the astronauts as a preening, squeeky clean corps of orbiting sunday school teachers is the result of years of pathetic NASA propaganda. It is an absurd fiction and it needs to stop.

There is no doubt that astronauts as a group are disinclined to do anything that would negatively affect their flight status and the likelihood an inebriated astronaut would adversely affect a mission is between slim and none.  The buzz over Paris Hilton has run its course and the news business is looking for more titillation to maintain the national slack-jaw coefficient.

NASA should spend its resources trying to find more compelling reasons to maintain manned spaceflight rather than ginning up SOP‘s for greater oversight of astronaut blood alcohol levels.