Hi Buck

The LSAM is bigger and better and a logical upgrade from Apollo. He's right we don't need ridiculous insistence on unproven new technologies before going back to the Moon. The whole Shuttle=>Space Base => Space Tug/NERVA shuttle => Moon Station design was full of out-dated ideas about what space-travel needed. Let's face it manned orbital space-stations only made sense when an army of technicians were needed to replace valves and rewind magnetic cores. We have the HLLV technology for direct launch to the Moon - and even LEO rendevous is direct launch compared to space-station assembly, orbital fuel dumps and similar crap from the 1940s.

Even the old SF writers guessed something like our HLLV was the way to the Moon - in Heinlein's "The Man Who Sold the Moon" it was a staged chemical rocket that first landed. But then the whole paraphernalia of geo-synch stations, interorbital liners and L1 stations with specialised landers came along and dominated everyone's thinking. Such things might have value when there's significant interplanetary traffic and an L1 station attached to a space-elevator perhaps, but it's not a key-stone for a moon program.

I think we need HLLV, especially for Mars but for bulk lunar cargo too, but I think there's merit to lower-mass moon-launches that smaller private efforts can contribute to. SpaceDev has one such plan and I really hope Griffin sees its merits - we need the Moon earlier than 2020.

Adam