[lupusreal]

That's wrong. There is no need to ever fly humans on unproven rockets. NASA has historically done it that way for non-technical reasons. For instance, the Shuttle could have been designed for unmanned operations, but that would have pissed off the astronauts by undermining their claim to necessity, and that was important to NASA at an organizational level because astronauts get NASA funding by keeping the public interested. And so they designed the Shuttle such that people must be on it. Then they started using the Shuttle to simply launch commercial satellites. Why would you ever put seven human lives on the line to launch a satellite, when you can just as well do that without endangering anybody? It was completely senseless risk and they thankfully stopped doing that after Challenger. Just because you can find people willing to go to space for any reason doesn't mean the government should be funding such pointless idiocy.