Separate Cargo and Personnel Missions for NASA?

l8f57 writes "Hal Gerham (from the NASA CAIB report) is calling for cargo and people to be separated into different missions. He also goes on about how a re-usable spacecraft may not be the most cost efficient vehicle."

Comments

Irony of Ironies

[Jeremy Erwin]

The Columbia mission wasn't a cargo mission. It wasn't even an ISS mission. It was scientific mission using SpaceHab.

The biggest advantage

[Mr. Darl McBride]

The biggest advantage, partly addressed in the article, is that you can send non-living cargo up with a much, much, much hotter burn. The shuttle could accelerate many times faster than it does if the G force for the humans inside weren't an issue.

Experiments have been done with animals, accelerating them more quickly by suspending them in liquids and otherwise distributing the G forces, but the advances in this area of research have been slow and often times erratic. Monkeys have seemed fine after the research, only to show internal damage months or even years later.

That the idea of pre-shipping cargo is being taken seriously is a very, very exciting thing!

Re-usability seen as harmful

[PCM2]

He also goes on about how a re-usable spacecraft may not be the most cost efficient vehicle.

That's not how I read it. To me, it sounds like he's saying that any efforts by NASA to divert time/energy/know-how/budget into making things more re-usable as a way of cutting long term costs will only divert those resources from the effort to make the space program more safe. If we agree that, having had some really bad setbacks, safety is now the top priority, then it doesn't make sense to keep focusing on issues like re-usability. The exact quote:

"Any other requirements, like reusability to reduce costs, the ability to also carry cargo, or additional functions besides crew transport, would eat into the vehicle's safety margin."