Ground Control To Major Tom

Okay, I'm just going to have to accept that the heroes that I have in the world of sports are probably addicts, criminals, or fast on their way to becoming one or the other or both. I will become comfortable betting on the substances used to perform rather than the point spread. It's just a matter of perspective.
But now the astronauts have started up again. I can appreciate that you'd probably have to be drunk or crazy to strap yourself to the top of a giant series of high explosives to be sent out into the vacuum of space. I can understand that the stresses of such activity as an occupation must be overwhelming at times, but come on, wasn't the whole kidnapping/adult diaper story enough? Now NASA is telling us that after drinking heavily, an astronaut flew on a Russian spacecraft and another was cleared to launch on a space shuttle.
What am I so worried about? It's not like they're going to run into anything out there. I feel a whole lot safer launching Lindsay Lohan into space instead of turning her loose on the highways of California. The Mercury astronauts were certainly as hard-living a bunch of test pilots as could be imagined or chronicled by Tom Wolfe, but I want to believe that they saved their binges for after their liftoffs.
Or maybe I'm wrong. Maybe we shouldn't hold our heroes up to the light, lest they appear all too flawed - too human. "There's certainly no intent to impugn the entire astronaut corps," Colonel Richard Bachmann Junior said. "We don't have enough data to call it alcohol abuse. We have no way of knowing if these are the only two incidents that have ever occurred in the history of the astronaut corps or if they're the tip of a very large iceberg." The good news? Iceberg tips are barely visible from space.