Canopus

ESM was devised in 2013 so i guess not. You also seem to be missing the point a little. The ESM will have no pressurized space so its not an equivalent of the whole TKS situation, it provides only life support, power and propulsion.

Well the ESM is only loosely based on the ATV anyway so it has no docking ports. Docking Ports aren't the point of the Service module

So you are proposing a reusable shuttle that flies from leo to lunar orbit and back? If that was an option we wouldn't need the Orion Capsule anyway. I don't really see why it would have to be a Salyut though.

Yeah i really don't get the idea here.

Yes it weighs more with Service module, but it also has way more Delta V.

Orions mission is to reenter from high orbits as to enable human exploration beyond low earth orbit. I don't see how an old Russian Spacestation could fill that role unless itself was equipped with a big service module to break into LEO and meet with a Soyuz. Orion (the Capsule only) weighs 10 tons. Salyut 7 was 20 tons.

Yeah but sending an entire space station with even less Delta v every time you fly an Orion doesn't sound like a reasonable alternative to the ESM.

Salyut is a Space station though not a service Module i don't see the connection there. About the delta v, i guess not they don't need that much for the Missions planned with the Orion. It seems like it doesn't take as much fuel to get to the Distant Retrograde Orbit or near rectilinear Halo orbit as opposed to low Lunar Orbit.

I tried copying it and now it works for me too, seems that just moving it is not enough.

The problem is that both solutions don't seem to work anymore.

Wouldn‘t the roundtrip for control and feedback be something like 3 seconds? Let‘s say you where to conduct some kind of critical work on the Surface like building a habitat (i know its unlikely to happen soon) wouldn‘t it still be beneficial to control or atleast monitor something like the Canadarm in realtime? Well maybe it‘s just wishfull thinking on my part. I guess i am just happy to see people leaving LEO for the first time in 50 years.

Support of unmanned surface mission like teleoperating robots with less delay? Construction and servicing spacecraft for missions to asteroids and maybe eventually Mars, testing manned spaceflight outside the Earths Magnetic field. Atleast thats what Nasa themselves suggest. Who knows what international Partners will do with the station? I think it offers more possibilities than the ISS.

But now that they have a payload and a destination isn‘t the while point moot? There isn‘t really another launcher that can support a Space station in Lunar Orbit and once they start building the DSG, nobody will cut the Funding and end the SLS. And since the budget for probes is seperate from manned missions (atleast i think it is) i don‘t really see the downsite to the whole thing. And seeing that the ISS has attracted companys like Orbital ATK and spacex i think it can only help in the private sector too

What Rocket other than the Saturn V was built with a specific payload in mind?

The moons mass isn't evenly spread around. It has Pockets of denser materials all over its surface. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_concentration_(astronomy)