Adding astronauts to a maiden voyage would cost too much to ensure safety.
There really is a feeling that we are at the beginning of the 'golden age' in space flight that we have all been waiting so long for. Both NASA and SpaceX have plans in place to send rockets and humans into our solar system and to perminent outposts on Mars and the Moon. Elon Musk's company wants to use the moon as a pit stop on its way to Mars, and NASA wanted to include a human crew on its now-delayed launch to test a new rocket and companion capsule. Today, however, a study by NASA has concluded that sending astronauts on the first flight is not feasible as the costs of keeping them safe are just too high. No this seems like common sense to me.
NASA's acting administrator Robert Lightfoot Jr. requested the review back in February when he announced the agency's intention to add the crew to its 2018 launch. "I know the challenges associated with such a proposition," he wrote in a memo to NASA employees, "like reviewing the technical feasibility, additional resources needed, and clearly the extra work would require a different launch date." In April, the launch date was pushed back to 2019 due to technical problems.
"We agree with the GAO that maintaining a November 2018 launch readiness date is not in the best interest of the program, and we are in the process of establishing a new target in 2019," writes NASA administrator William Gerstenmaier in a statement.
This is yet another setback for the SLS program, which was started in 2010 and has already been delayed from 2016, its original scheduled launch date. Among the problems noted in the GAO report are structural weaknesses in the rocket's core stage, delays on the Orion capsule's European Service Module, and additional complexities arising from integrating multiple independent components. Both the GAO and NASA agree that these challenges make a 2018 launch date nearly impossible.
Whether NASA or the Trump administration will take the recent study into account or not is still up in the air, according to a Bloomberg source. Still, adding a human crew to a potentially catastrophic maiden voyage like this can only increase the chances of a national tragedy, which would definitely slow down the current rush to return to space.
Source: Bloomberg