It is known that Griffin's Moon architecture was developed by Thiokol, and that it was originally concieved as little more than a test of a manned Mars lander. That's why it has the methane engines.

As such, the architecture shows a complete lack of memory of the design work done for Apollo extended applications, and it is incapable of doing any real work on the Moon.

Politically, at this point Griffin would probably be better off talking about it as test articles for manned flight to Mars, but my estimate is that his problem here is the public is simply unwilling to pay for manned flight to Mars, and particularly does not like the idea of using solids to launch large nuclear reactors. But since it will all come out in the end, why not go for broke?

Again, I think that the only thing the public (or any public, for that matter) might be willing to pay for is CAPS. If you design your sytem to do CAPS cost effectively from the start, then you might have resources available to do manned Mars flight.

The key here may be for the Russian designers to incorporate the impactor detection elements of CAPS into their currrent lunar architecture, and begin to talk about it openly.