Most of the alternatives put forth against ESAS are different launch vehicle concepts, with no major changes to the nature of the lunar mission hardware or operations itself. Following up from his previous posts, Jon Goff has been exploring a different corner of the trade space, and has some interesting results. As a commenter points out there, he's grossly overoptimistic on his vehicle weights, but it remains an interesting avenue to explore, regardless.

Rand,
It could've helped if he had noticed that the mass he was talking about from Mark Wade's site was the Gross Mass, while the 4500lb number I gave was for the Empty Mass of the LM. Since my capsule wouldn't need to provide over 2km/s of delta-V using hypergols, I think we can safely say that we could cut back on that a wee bit.

Also, as you can probably see on the spreadsheets, all of the launchers used are operating at under capcity, so we could make things a bit heavier. The only problem is then you really start wanting to be able to stretch the centaur, or add more robust OMS/RCS functions to the capsule. The capsule numbers are optimistic, but not *that* optimistic. SpaceX, t/Space, and Lockheed Martin all seem to think they can make crew capsules that weigh less than 2500lb/person, so I think it's not that unreasonable.

The architecture isn't as robust as I would prefer, but if you allow for propellant transfer and WBCs, it opens up a lot of extra margin that could be tapped to provide that increased level of robustness.

~Jon

I assert that many of these ideas are better suited for the private sector rather than NASA. Anyone every notice the Prada store in Marfa Texas?

http://www.zibs.com/blog/archives/2006/04/

What about Prada-Luna?

Thanx Rand.

ermqvp Hi, Nice! http://t3453734783est0.com [url=http://t3453734783est1.com]test1[/url] test2