Nasa nixes crew for test flight of new megarocket in 2019

Nasa’s new megarocket will launch without astronauts on its test flight, now delayed until 2019 because of technical challenges, the space agency’s top leaders said Friday.

In February at the request of the White House, Nasa began studying the possibility of putting a crew on the first flight. After reviewing the costs and risks, the space agency decided against it. The White House took part in the decision, said Nasa’s acting administrator Robert Lightfoot.

Still in development, the super-sized Space Launch System rocket is meant to eventually send astronauts to Mars. The first launch had been targeted for next year, but now won’t happen until 2019 when Nasa will send an unoccupied Orion capsule to the vicinity of the moon for a threeweek trial run.

The second flight will have astronauts on board. It is scheduled for 2021, but will almost certainly be later because of all the delays with the first flight.

It would have cost a lot more money and time to add life-support systems and other human-required equipment for the test flight, said Bill Gerstenmaier, head of Nasa’s human explorations and operations.

Lightfoot said it would have been technically feasible to add a crew, given more funding, but decided to stay the course.

It would have cost an extra $600 million to $900 million to outfit the system for astronauts on the initial flight, Gerstenmaier said.

Earlier this week, Nasa reported that a section of test hardware was damaged during manufacturing in New Orleans. No one was injured in the May 3 mishap. Technicians were lowering the dome for the bottom of a liquid oxygen tank, when the dome ended up ramming into a support structure. Nasa is investigating.

Late last month, the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) warned that a delay was likely for the first SLS flight, crew or not. The current exploration effort will cost nearly $24 billion by the end of fiscal 2018, the GAO reported.