On Friday evening, I caught a CSPAN broadcast of the Cato Institute Book Forum - "Space: The Free-Market Frontier". (Originally aired 04/16/03)

One of the speakers was Buzz Aldrin, and he gave a presentation of an alternative to NASA’s new space plane/expendable booster proposal.

The Aldrin alternative was basically an STS External Tank and SRB’s with a non-winged 8-crew module strapped on in place of an Orbiter. The module had a replaceable ablative TPS, instead of shuttle type tiles, and used three R-86 rocket engines. (If I remember correctly)
There were several variants of the spacecraft, said to be capable of lifting shuttle size or larger payloads to LEO, and a couple of variants capable of Trans Lunar Insertion with a crew of 4, and a fairly large payload. (3 or 4 thousand pounds, I think?)
This is WAY out of my field,…but it looked like a better interim measure than the little NASA space plane.
Anybody else see this CSPAN broadcast?