Capitol Hill testimony on the issue of preflight alcohol abuse by astronauts Sept. 6 didn't resolve conflicting accounts that have grown up around the charges.

Top NASA managers, including Administrator Michael Griffin and chief safety officer Bryan O'Connor, repeated to the House Science Space and Aeronautics subcommittee that they were "unable to verify" the incidents reported by the NASA Astronaut Health Care System Review Committee (DAILY, July 27).

But Air Force Col. Richard E. Bachmann, Jr., a career flight surgeon who is dean of his service's school of aerospace medicine, testified that all eight members of the panel he chaired endorsed the final report, including its accounts of intoxicated astronauts.

"NASA astronauts and medical personnel described two specific instances of alcohol use as examples of a much larger issue - that NASA personnel felt human-factors concerns with safety implications had been disregarded when raised to local on-scene leadership," Bachmann said. "The interviewees were eyewitnesses to the events, and provided the information voluntarily."

Bachmann said the two incidents - involving a Soyuz flight and a T-38 trainer flight after a space shuttle scrub - were presented as examples of "demoralizing" disregard of genuine flight-safety concerns that sometimes have included "public humiliation" of those advancing their concerns.

"We understand the outrage that some members of NASA have expressed at this particular finding," he said. "However, public statements that such things are simply impossible, challenging the veracity of the finding, referring to them as unproven allegations and urban legends, rather than acknowledging how difficult raising such concerns can be, [does] not encourage openness and safety."

Bachmann's testimony was a direct shot at Griffin, who coined the "urban legend" analogy to explain the discrepancy between the panel's report and O'Connor's subsequent findings (DAILY, Aug. 30), and at unnamed NASA officials who told reporters there was dissension within the panel on its findings. He also took to task some of the Johnson Space Center (JSC) flight surgeons who signed a letter appended to O'Connor's flight-safety review of the alcohol allegations.

In their letter the "flight docs" stated unanimously that they had "not observed any astronaut impaired by alcohol" during flight operations. But Bachmann said at least some of them were "in the room" when his panel heard the alcohol accounts, and suggested only that they may have parsed their wording carefully when reporters asked him if he believes they were lying.

At least three of the eight panel members heard the accounts from flight surgeons, Bachmann said, and a single member heard corroborating testimony from one astronaut and relayed it to the other panelists. Since the report was delivered on July 16, he said he has heard of a possible third incident involving an interaction between alcohol and a sleep medication commonly prescribed to military pilots before missions.

However, given the lack of specificity the panel received as to the times of the alleged incidents, Bachmann said he didn't know if it was in fact a separate incident or one of the two already reported. Following the panel's recommendation of an anonymous survey of astronauts, flight surgeons and others involved in preparing flight crews for missions might eliminate some of the confusion, he said.

Astronaut Ellen Ochoa, director of flight crew operations at JSC, said the agency agrees with Bachmann on both the need for a survey and the form it should take to gain maximum candor. Subjects will be asked to give numerical ratings to some statements, and to draft written responses to some questions in a search for patterns Bachmann says have proven very useful to Air Force officers assessing the environments of their units after a change of command.