Committee Leaders Comment on NASA’s Astronaut Health Care Survey Report
Washington, DC - This afternoon, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) released a report on an astronaut and flight surgeon health care survey that it conducted last fall. The report summarizes the anonymous responses of astronauts and flight surgeons to a series of questions on the quality of astronaut healthcare.
On September 6, 2007, the Committee’s Subcommittee on Space and Aeronautics held a hearing aimed at investigating the findings of two NASA reports concerning the astronaut medical and behavioral healthcare system. On July 27, 2007 NASA released the results of an independent external review they commissioned in the wake of the controversy surrounding astronaut Lisa Nowak. That report was designed to provide “objective assessment, problem identification and recommendations for action” to assure that NASA’s astronaut corps was fit for flight. The review’s findings identified a number of significant issues related to NASA culture, communication and behavioral concerns including the mention of pre-flight alcohol abuse by astronauts.
At the September hearing Col. Richard E. Bachmann, Jr., Commander and Dean of the U.S. Air Force School of Aerospace Medicine – and Chair of the independent review committee – stated in his testimony that, “Although the astronauts and family members interviewed do not represent a random or exhaustive sample of the larger population, the issues they raised during these unstructured interviews were remarkably consistent and compelling and deserve focused action.”
Col. Bachmann further noted that as the review progressed, it became apparent that “major vulnerabilities, underlying root causes and contributing factors extend well beyond the specific medical aspects of NASA operations. Many of the cultural and structural issues identified in the report have existed for many years, pre-dating the current leadership team, are deeply ingrained and will take senior leadership action to remediate them.”
Committee leaders today welcomed NASA’s release of the report, but urged the agency to move quickly to address the concerns raised in the survey and the prior assessments.
Committee Chairman Bart Gordon (D-TN) noted, “The findings of NASA’s anonymous survey echo a number of the concerns originally raised last summer by Col. Bachmann’s external astronaut health care assessment panel. NASA now needs to demonstrate its sustained and serious commitment to addressing those concerns, and the Committee will work to see that they do so.”
Space and Aeronautics Subcommittee Chairman Mark Udall (D-CO) added, “The hearing I called last fall to examine NASA’s astronaut health care system raised a number of serious issues that NASA needed to address. While the anonymous survey released today provides some useful data, NASA’s action plan for addressing the problems identified last year is still unavailable. NASA needs to provide that plan expeditiously if Congress is to be confident that NASA is serious about dealing with concerns raised by Col. Bachmann and others, and I intend to press NASA to do so.”
###
Related Subcommittees
Next Article Previous Article