The human factor

A temporary setback for a manned moon rocket

In a week full of setbacks for President Donald Trump, NASA’s decision to deny his request to include humans on the maiden voyage of the new Orion moon rocket in 2019 is par for the course.

NASA’s acting director Robert M. Lightfoot said that adding a life-support system for an astronaut or two to what was originally planned as a human-free launch would add an additional $600 million to $900 million to the $24 billion cost of the threeweek mission. The plan is for Orion to fly thousands of miles beyond the moon while being piloted from Earth.

There would be plenty of opportunities for disaster, but little scientific return for the added cost of accommodating an astronaut or two on the first launch. Even without expanding the mission to include humans, NASA announced that the Orion launch date had been moved to 2019 from late 2018.

The advantage of a crewless Orion mission is that NASA can test the limits of the new generation of spacecraft without fear of killing anyone. Astronauts will be aboard Orion’s second mission in Aug. 2021, so Mr. Trump’s disappointment need not be long-term.

The Orion mission is the product of NASA’s cooperation with the European Space Agency. Unlike that of many other federal agencies, NASA’s funding is expected to remain steady. It is competing against two major rivals in the private sector — Elon Musk’s SpaceX rocket company and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin rocket company that boasts it will send a rocket around the moon in 2020. Both companies have made reusable rockets the cornerstone of future viability.

Space is such a vast and imposing realm full of unimagined challenges that there’s more than enough room for even the most cantankerous human differences to look meaningless by comparison.