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NASA Won't Fly Astronauts On First Orion-SLS Test Flight Around the Moon (space.com)

Posted by BeauHD on from the safety-first dept.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Space.com: The first flight of NASA's next-generation heavy-lift rocket, the Space Launch System (SLS), is now scheduled for 2019 and will not include a human crew, agency officials said today (May 12). As of 2016, NASA had planned for the SLS' first flight to take place in 2018, without a crew on board. But the transition team that the Trump administration sent to the agency earlier this year asked for an internal evaluation of the possibility of launching a crew atop the SLS inside the agency's Orion space capsule. Robert Lightfoot, NASA's acting administrator, said during a news conference today that, based on the results of this internal evaluation, a crewed flight would be "technically feasible," but the agency will proceed with its initial plan to make the rocket's first flight uncrewed. The internal evaluation "really reaffirmed that the baseline plan we had in place was the best way for us to go," Lightfoot said. "We have a good handle on how that uncrewed mission will actually help [the first crewed mission of SLS] be a safer mission when we put crew on there." SLS' first flight will be called Exploration Mission 1, or EM-1, and will send an uncrewed Orion capsule (which has already made one uncrewed test flight, aboard a United Launch Alliance Delta IV Heavy rocket) on a roughly three-week trip around the moon. The first crewed flight, EM-2, was originally scheduled to follow in 2021.

8 of 92 comments (clear)

  1. Sounds Smart by KeensMustard · · Score: 4, Funny

    Not loading down the spaceship with useless baggage is always a good idea. Hopefully Orion will continue to be unmanned.

    1. Re:Sounds Smart by Ol+Olsoc · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Not loading down the spaceship with useless baggage is always a good idea. Hopefully Orion will continue to be unmanned.

      Nah - you don't understand many (most) space junkies. With humans in space, I support defense department type funding. Your dream of no humans. I support a budget of exactly $0.00.

      Sorry but for most of us, your useless baggage is our raison d'être for a space program.

      --
      The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
    2. Re:Sounds Smart by Dutch+Gun · · Score: 3, Insightful

      I've never liked picking sides in the "manned vs unmanned" space debate, as I believe a comprehensive space program requires both, although perhaps not in equal numbers.

      Deep space missions and exploration? Yeah, it's pretty clear that robotics are the way to go. But I also want to get humans seeded on other worlds, or in permanent, self-sustaining space-based colonies. It's true that crewed space missions inflate the costs tremendously, so we have to pick those missions very carefully.

      --
      Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
    3. Re:Sounds Smart by K.+S.+Kyosuke · · Score: 2

      Humans on site can also teleoperate a bunch of robots in real or near-real time. They can also fix things with spare parts when something breaks. Both are problems now. Other than that, robotics is very handy.

      --
      Ezekiel 23:20
    4. Re:Sounds Smart by Ol+Olsoc · · Score: 2

      I've never liked picking sides in the "manned vs unmanned" space debate, as I believe a comprehensive space program requires both, although perhaps not in equal numbers.

      Exactly. I am all for the deep space probes we are doing now. Just as one example, the Pluto flyby had (has) me entranced. I can't imagine doing such a thing with humans until we can get a lot more velocity to our space transports. But without the concept of human presence off earth, what would be the purpose of having any space program at all? We can bring up comm satellites, maybe GPS, but we can do without those.

      The anti-human space exploration folks just don''t seem to get that the science of robot exploration is damn cool, but other than scientific reasons, there's no overriding reason at all to say - send a probe to Jupiter. Since we can piggyback those things onto the human portion of space exploration, we're getting a lot of good science we might not get otherwise.

      --
      The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
  2. Re: Trump Kills by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Typos can be fixed, but there is no fixing stupid.

  3. Put him in it by nospam007 · · Score: 5, Funny

    They could put some private person on it, who craves attention tremendously. Sad.

  4. Obviously that's where the bases are by drinkypoo · · Score: 2

    Because aliens.
    Or Battlezone.

    --
    "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"