The hardware and cargo required for lunar missions would lift off aboard a 40-story colossus built around the shuttle's external fuel tank. This unmanned booster would be developed between 2010 and 2018.

Five of the shuttle's main engines and larger versions of its twin booster rockets would power the launcher. Some versions would be capable of carrying a hefty 125 tons into Earth orbit, making it almost the equal of the Saturn 5. The projected price tag of $540 million per launch is comparable to the cost of a shuttle flight.

Pricey but we won't be launching it as often as we did the shuttle. If we ground the shuttle now we can start the HLLV development now to run paralell with CEV development instead of waiting until 2010!

Starting in June 2011, astronauts would lift off to the station atop a modified version of the shuttle's pencil-shaped solid-rocket booster. The rocket's new second stage would be powered by one of the shuttle's main engines.

The $280 million missions would free NASA from having to depend solely on the Russians for station flights after the shuttle's retirement. The same rocket later would be used to launch crews into low Earth orbit to begin trips to the moon. NASA estimates the launcher would be nine times safer than the shuttle.

"We have ways to construct such vehicles using shuttle solid-rocket motors and external tanks and shuttle main engines," Griffin said of the new boosters Friday. "We think the existing components offer us huge cost advantages as opposed to starting from a clean sheet of paper, and that's what I've proposed doing."

Half the cost and nine times safer to get astronauts to space. I was hoping for better but it's not bad...