Ed Wrote: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.

Chris writes: Actually the architecture comes out of studies done over the years. You point out one of them awhile back (The Planetary Society Report). And there is nothing wrong with using methane on the Moon ISRU if there is cometary ices there ammonia is going to be part of that resource. Besides the point of this little VSE was MMB and a test of Mars related systems is part of that...so YES methane.

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.

No! It doesn't ignore the past studies and hardware. These are much bigger landers and command modules with utilities beyond the original LM and CM. They will have on station times up to a year.

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?

Actually they're hearing this is a return to the Moon then maybe Mars years from now. So if they don't like VSE it isn't because of the Mars in the far future part. Anyway, you have no bases for these claims about public opinion. Polls from Gallup are no better than polls by other companies which suggest the complete opposite views are held by the public. So when told what value a mission to Mars has and how little it would actually cost the public are for it in a positive way. There is no survey which asks the public which launchers they prefer for nuclear reactors! To make that statement you have projected your own views. At this point nobody is even suggesting we have to launch nuclear reactors in any case. A good argument can be made for solids for launching anything over liquid systems. The technologies have change since von Braun. You are living in the past!

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.

Well I can't claim that nobody care anymore because the congress has passed a NEO detection section in S.1281. But there is no ploo that suggests the public have CAPS at the top of their agenda for NASA. Again you are projecting your own views on everyone else.

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.

Really? Where? Please give us a frew examples where they are doing that. A lunar telescope doesn't count unless it is for meant for CAPS.