In article om,
says...

On 2017-04-29 08:59, Jeff Findley wrote:

Absolutely not. It would take far longer to certify the upper stage and
put all the ground infrastructure in place needed for manned flights.


So they build a whole brand spanking new rocket system to send people to
nowhere and it isn't designed to be man-rated from the get go, so they
intend to build a version and then change the designs to make it man rated?

The first flight will use an Interim Upper Stage derived from Delta IV
(I believe). It's not the stage intended to be used for any manned
launches.

If that is truly the case, the contractors are smarter than I thought
(at convincing govt to spend money over far more years than necessary).

No, it's due to the fact that the "real" SLS upper stage was known to be
very late (years ago), so the "early" first flight simply could not use
it. Because this Interim Upper Stage would never fly manned, it was
never certified for manned flight.

This "idea" almost certainly came from clueless people in Trump's
administration.

Didn't the seeds for first flight being manned come before jan 20th?

I am unsure of the timing, but it surely came from President (Elect)
Trump's transition team.

or perhaps this was pre-emptive. If you fear the new inexperienced and
rash guy is going to make impulsive decision to kill off programme, you
send trial balloon that the delay will allow first flight to be manned
(an improvement instead of a failure to launch on time).

Yea, no, that's not what happened. NASA management is sometimes
clueless, but they surely had some idea of how big of a delay a manned
EM-1 would cause. Because of this, they wouldn't have proposed this
internally. They want to fly this thing "soon", even if it's not the
"final" configuration (i.e. using a one-off Interim Upper Stage).

Jeff
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