Comment by randomNumber7

> Nothing stops you from doing this with manned flights except that it's not culturally accepted currently.

Trained astronauts are also really 'expensive'. In addition to the innate worth of a human (which you might chalk up to culture), there's also lots of opportunity costs of what the astronaut could otherwise do, and replacement cost of their training etc are pretty high, too.

> But maybe that changes as NASA will demonstrate with artemis 2 and 3 (which will then use another newly desiged heat shield).

It would arguably be better (or less worse) if they did this deliberately and designed the mission from the ground up to be pushed to failure and to learn as much as possible from that failure. Instead of just accidentally sacrificing people.