Washington, July 28: Nasa officials at least twice disregarded warnings from flight surgeons and astronauts that crew members who were getting ready to go into space appeared to be drunk, the chairman of a panel appointed to examine the agency’s handling of astronauts’ physical and mental health said yesterday.

In one case, an apparently impaired astronaut was launched aboard a Russian Soyuz spacecraft, while the other involved a scrubbed space shuttle flight and a subsequent flight the same day on a Nasa training aircraft.

“These two incidents of alcohol use were chosen to illustrate a larger problem,” said Colonel Richard E. Bachmann Jr., head of the review panel created early this year.

Bachmann said flight surgeons and astronauts had reported the incidents to superiors and that “their professional input seemed to be disregarded at the local level, leaving them feeling demoralised about reporting in the future”.

The panel’s findings carried echoes of the 1986 Challenger and 2003 Columbia space shuttle disasters. In both cases, investigators concluded that Nasa managers had failed to heed warning flags that should have alerted them to potentially catastrophic dangers.

Nasa prohibits drinking by astronauts in the 12 hours before any flight, but the review panel reported that “interviews with both flight surgeons and astronauts identified some episodes of heavy use of alcohol by astronauts in the immediate pre-flight period... Alcohol is freely used in crew quarters”, where astronauts are quarantined to prepare for launches.