ESA needs to save NASA’s Moon plans.

[Beccab]

25 minutes ago, Exoscientist said:

The SLS could mount the mission to the lunar surface by itself with no need for the Starship.

...SLS can't even make one launch per year. How is going to suddenly make 4/5 launches to the moon with even more hardware needed to be built by simply replacing the upper stage, which is not the long lead item of the rocket (as all the ICPSs needed for the first missions are nearly complete)?

29 minutes ago, Exoscientist said:

The SLS could mount the mission to the lunar surface by itself with no need for the Starship.

Sorry but no, it can't. This whole post is full of reasons for which it can't comanifest a lander, you have simply ignored most of them

31 minutes ago, Exoscientist said:

This is because of the large amount of fuel needed for going back and forth to the Gateway:

It's actually because Zubrin hasn't even understood the architecture:

"[...] to land on the moon, discharge its cargo, and return to the Gateway would require a further 400 tons of propellant delivered to the Gateway, or four trans-lunar tankers. Each of these would need to be enabled for flight from LEO to the gateway by three further tanker flights, for a total of 20 Starship launches for each piloted lunar mission. That doesn’t make sense"

Zubrin is correct in that it doesn't make sense; in fact, he made up that architecture in order to make his own plan look better, something he has done repeatedly in the past. There is absolutely zero reason to send the fuel in three separate lunar tankers to the moon: the plan is for Lunar Starship to be refueled in LEO, first in expendable mode (remaining in NRHO) and later on with multiple options available to make it reusable (with again no reason to fly three separate and nearly empty Starships even inthe  case you want it to refuel it in lunar orbit). Not only the calculations are irrelevant now considering how different the 2020 design and the 2021 one are, but most of those numbers are made up given how little information about dry mass, isp and payload capacity were available at the time.

42 minutes ago, Exoscientist said:

Gateway with its great added cost and time delay,

Yeah uh, good luck killing gateway. It has a huge support in congress and is backed by many nations, to the point it's main role has become ensuring Artemis' political survival. It's just as unkillable as SLS in the near future

[Exoscientist]

On 7/27/2022 at 4:34 AM, Beccab said:

Yeah uh, good luck killing gateway. It has a huge support in congress and is backed by many nations, to the point it's main role has become ensuring Artemis' political survival. It's just as unkillable as SLS in the near future

 

 We are agreed on that. But the thing to remember is the only reason why the Gateway was proposed was that without an extended upper stage, the SLS didn’t have enough power to send the Orion to low lunar orbit. But NASA couldn’t afford the extended upper stage proposed by Boeing. But with an upper stage already built and flying reliably by the ESA for decades such a stage could be made available relatively cheaply, i.e., compared to building such a stage entirely from scratch.

  Robert Clark

[tater]

On 7/27/2022 at 1:43 AM, Exoscientist said:

The intent is to make manned spaceflight to the Moon routine, or at least as routine as flights to the ISS are now.

This would require SLS to fly far, far more than it will ever fly. At the very least this would require it flying 2X a year for 6 month stays at the Moon, 4-5X a year if you count Soyuz crew flights to ISS into the annual norms.

On 7/27/2022 at 1:43 AM, Exoscientist said:

Robert Zubrin estimated it would actually take ~20 launches of the Starship under the current proposal

1. What Zubrin esimates is irrelevant, what SpaceX actually needs is all that matters.

2. The number of launches of SS is irrelevant. During the last period SLS was sitting on the pad, 1000s of airliners flew past it within X miles, those flights didn't matter, either. Caring about the number of flights to refill the vehicle only matters if those flights are precious, and/or it raises the cost to the people paying for it (taxpayers).

 

On 7/27/2022 at 1:43 AM, Exoscientist said:

The SLS could mount the mission to the lunar surface by itself with no need for the Starship.

LOL. In what alternate reality is this possible?

In the one where Orion goes away, and a new CSM is designed and built such that a TLI stack with ~38t of CSM/lander is available? Sure. A leaner, meaner CSM and lander than Apollo gets developed? We should have that in what, 20 years, and maybe $40B? Or is this the alternate reality where SLS can throw 70t to TLI—which maybe they develop in what, 10 years and $20B? Or the alternate reality where they can launch 2 Block 1B SLS within a couple weeks of each other (whatever year that is actually available)?

 

On 7/27/2022 at 2:34 AM, Beccab said:

It's actually because Zubrin hasn't even understood the architecture:

This, he really doesn't seem to get it. His original tool, the Mars Direct idea is his hammer he tries to use on literally everything after that.

Edited July 28, 2022 by tater

[tater]

15 minutes ago, Exoscientist said:

 We are agreed on that. But the thing to remember is the only reason why the Gateway was proposed was that without an extended upper stage, the SLS didn’t have enough power to send the Orion to low lunar orbit. But NASA couldn’t afford the extended upper stage proposed by Boeing. But with an upper stage already built and flying reliably by the ESA for decades such a stage could be made available relatively cheaply, i.e., compared to building such a stage entirely from scratch.

Orion can go to LLO with any SLS, it just can't return if it does so, having used almost all it's remaining dv to do the LOI burn.

The notion that the ESA stage could be stuck on "relatively cheaply" is flatly absurd, even if it closed dv wise.

Orion+lander in 1 stack requires ~70t to TLI. The lander is in fact "Altair" from the Constellation days in terms of capability. It must do the LOI burn for the stack, land, and return, then Orion does TEI for return. I assume the Ariane upper stage is known to be designed to support 70,000kg sitting on top of it, or is is designed for 20t, or whatever payload it could ever have reasonably been expected to carry? I tend to think the latter, so any attempt to use it would require demonstrating it can survive that for crew rating. It also means a third MLP is needed. Given the testing, etc how long might all that take, "cheaply?" Crazy fast for SLS... 5-10 years of work on the stage alone, once finally at CDR, they magically start the MLP, which takes 3 years... 2030?

Not a thing.

[sevenperforce]

On 7/27/2022 at 3:43 AM, Exoscientist said:

 The intent is to make manned spaceflight to the Moon routine, or at least as routine as flights to the ISS are now. That’s not going to happen when it takes 8 to 16 launches of a Saturn V class launcher for a single mission to the Moon.

If it took 8-16 launches of a Saturn V class launcher to do a single moon mission, then moon missions would be extremely rare.

It does not take 8-16 launches of a Saturn V class launcher to do a single moon mission, because Starship is not a Saturn V class launcher.

On 7/27/2022 at 3:43 AM, Exoscientist said:

Robert Zubrin estimated it would actually take ~20 launches of the Starship under the current proposal

Zubrin is wrong and his numbers are silly and he doesn't even understand the current proposal.

On 7/27/2022 at 3:43 AM, Exoscientist said:

the only reason why NASA proposes using the Gateway in the first place is because the SLS without an extended upper stage does not have enough power to take the Orion to low lunar orbit about the Moon and back again.

SLS with an extended upper stage does not have enough power to take Orion to LLO and back again, because Orion itself does not have enough dV to go to LLO and back again. The long pole is Orion, not SLS.

On 7/27/2022 at 3:43 AM, Exoscientist said:

With an extended upper stage . . . The SLS could mount the mission to the lunar surface by itself with no need for the Starship.

Evidence suggests that it could not. 

1 hour ago, Exoscientist said:

the only reason why the Gateway was proposed was that without an extended upper stage, the SLS didn’t have enough power to send the Orion to low lunar orbit.

No matter how extended an SLS upper stage may be, Orion still cannot go to LLO and come back to Earth. 

1 hour ago, Exoscientist said:

But NASA couldn’t afford the extended upper stage proposed by Boeing.

What proposed stage are you referring to?

Boeing's original LUS proposal evolved into the DUUS proposal, which was renamed the EUS, which NASA *is* buying. 

1 hour ago, Exoscientist said:

But with an upper stage already built and flying reliably by the ESA for decades such a stage could be made available relatively cheaply, i.e., compared to building such a stage entirely from scratch.

ESA does not have a suitable upper stage already built and flying reliably for decades.

[sgt_flyer]

4 hours ago, sevenperforce said:

If it took 8-16 launches of a Saturn V class launcher to do a single moon mission, then moon missions would be extremely rare.

It does not take 8-16 launches of a Saturn V class launcher to do a single moon mission, because Starship is not a Saturn V class launcher.

Zubrin is wrong and his numbers are silly and he doesn't even understand the current proposal.

SLS with an extended upper stage does not have enough power to take Orion to LLO and back again, because Orion itself does not have enough dV to go to LLO and back again. The long pole is Orion, not SLS.

Evidence suggests that it could not. 

No matter how extended an SLS upper stage may be, Orion still cannot go to LLO and come back to Earth. 

What proposed stage are you referring to?

Boeing's original LUS proposal evolved into the DUUS proposal, which was renamed the EUS, which NASA *is* buying. 

ESA does not have a suitable upper stage already built and flying reliably for decades.

Regarding ESA's collaboration for SLS's EUS, there was apparently talks about using Vinci rocket engines in place of the RL-10C3

https://web.archive.org/web/20161227034806/http://seradata.com/SSI/2014/11/next-steps-for-sls-europes-vinci-is-a-contender-for-exploration-upper-stage-engine/

 

Though given the delays they had in develloping that engine...

 

 

 

[tater]

^^^^ Cool link. Interesting that even with the improved designs they show TLI mass is at most ~52t.  Nothing on the Block 2 TLI, but it looks like it should be maybe high 50s per their page. Still not enough given Orion.

Edited July 29, 2022 by tater

[Exoscientist]

On 6/11/2022 at 10:21 PM, kerbiloid said:

1 x 3 000 t vs ~10 x 5 000 t, about ten successful flights with only one failed (and not due to the ship/rocket themselves)?

  Good point. Apollo did it at 3 million kilo launch mass. SpaceX 50 years later, with advances in materials and propulsion, proposes to do it at 50 million kilo launch mass and perhaps as much as 100 million kilo launch mass if Zubrin is right.

 Another way of saying this is the measure of large space projects known as “initial mass to LEO”, IMLEO, both stage mass and payload mass delivered to LEO. This was a common way of comparing Mars architectures. It can also be used for comparing any large space project. For Apollo it was 130,000 kilos. For the SpaceX plan it would be 2,500,000 kilos and perhaps as much as 5,000,000 kilos according to Zubrin. This for a single lunar mission.

  Robert Clark

Edited July 29, 2022 by Exoscientist

[Beccab]

5 minutes ago, Exoscientist said:

  Good point. Apollo did it at 3 million kilo launch mass. SpaceX 50 years later, with advances in materials and propulsion, proposes to do it at 50 million launch mass and perhaps as much as 100 million kilo launch mass if Zubrin is right.

 Another way of saying this is the measure of large space projects known as “initial mass to LEO”, IMLEO, both stage mass and payload mass delivered to LEO. This was a common way of comparing Mars architectures. It can also be used for comparing any large space project. For Apollo it was 130,000 kilos. For the SpaceX plan it would be 2,500,000 kilos and perhaps as much as 5,000,000 kilos according to Zubrin. This for a single lunar mission.

  Robert Clark

That's like saying that the Gemini to mars proposal is better than any design reference mission because its IMLEO is just 500 tons. Starship sure does require a higher IMLEO, but that carries 100 tons of payload to the lunar surface on a fully reusable configuration; the standard Apollo mission instead, even if you replace the LM with an LM Truck for the highest possible mass on a one-way mission to the surface of the moon, can get a whooping < 3 tons down there

Another example: is a Mercury Atlas better than a Saturn 1B stack because it's smaller and weights less at liftoff?

Edited July 29, 2022 by Beccab

[tater]

22 minutes ago, Exoscientist said:

  Good point. Apollo did it at 3 million kilo launch mass. SpaceX 50 years later, with advances in materials and propulsion, proposes to do it at 50 million kilo launch mass and perhaps as much as 100 million kilo launch mass if Zubrin is right.

Now do cost/kg.

Literally the only thing that matters.

[kerbiloid]

23 minutes ago, Beccab said:

That's like saying that the

only successful (and repeated six times) experience to the date is still the best humans have to compare everything with.

[tater]

15 minutes ago, Beccab said:

That's like saying that the Gemini to mars proposal is better than any design reference mission because its IMLEO is just 500 tons. Starship sure does require a higher IMLEO, but that carries 100 tons of payload to the lunar surface on a fully reusable configuration; the standard Apollo mission instead, even if you replace the LM with an LM Truck for the highest possible mass on a one-way mission to the surface of the moon, can get a whooping < 3 tons down there

Another example: is a Mercury Atlas better than a Saturn 1B stack because it's smaller and weights less at liftoff?

Exactly. The optimization here is cost. Cost per kg to LEO, cost to the surface of Mars or the Moon.

If the vehicles is reusable, that cost is the operational cost, plus propellant cost. Current F9 to LEO is ~$5000/kg retail (rideshare is $5500, cheaper w/larger mass). They are talking about costs as low as 10s of dollars per kg to LEO. So what if they launch 20-50X more mass for a mission, if it costs 1/300 per kg for that mass?

From a NASA perspective, the initial HLS cost is already known and fixed. $2.9B for the test mission, and the crew mission. Call it $1.5B per landing. NASA would pay more than that for any of the competing designs—we saw their proposals. So 10s of tons of cargo, plus crew for LESS than BO/Dynetics to land a few hundred kg, plus crew.

[Exoscientist]

46 minutes ago, Beccab said:

That's like saying that the Gemini to mars proposal is better than any design reference mission because its IMLEO is just 500 tons. Starship sure does require a higher IMLEO, but that carries 100 tons of payload to the lunar surface on a fully reusable configuration; the standard Apollo mission instead, even if you replace the LM with an LM Truck for the highest possible mass on a one-way mission to the surface of the moon, can get a whooping < 3 tons down there

Another example: is a Mercury Atlas better than a Saturn 1B stack because it's smaller and weights less at liftoff?

 

 Funnily enough Zubrin’s proposal of staging off the Starship accomplishes a Mars mission at only ~200 tons IMLEO at a single launch and it is better than the SpaceX plan:

 

[tater]

45 minutes ago, Exoscientist said:

 Funnily enough Zubrin’s proposal of staging off the Starship accomplishes a Mars mission at only ~200 tons IMLEO at a single launch and it is better than the SpaceX plan:

He should start a rocket factory and build it then.

Alternately, he can buy a bespoke upper stage, I'm sure they'd sell him one.

His shtick with SpaceX seems to be to propose mission architectures they are not interested in, then tell them to make it. It's a fundamental misunderstanding of what they are trying to do. Instead his proposal should be what exactly to ask for, then find someone with a big checkbook, and actually talk to them about building it.

Their goal is not to do a mission that Zubrin can then say, "Mars Direct is accomplished! I was right!" They don't want a 20 dry ton lander on the surface, they want Starship on the surface.

EDIT: The want 1000 Starships on the surface. Every synod.

Quote

and it is better than the SpaceX plan:

Says who? Need to underline this. It's better from whose perspective? From his (and your) assumption that "success" is flags and footprints with the least mass required? SpaceX tells you what they think success is in the Mars regime—a self-sustaining city on Mars.

As I say in all these threads, you, I—most people in this thread, and most people everywhere else can think that's insane—but we are not running SpaceX, and the people that are literally have that as their goal.

Failure to recognize that means that any subsequent proposal you make with their hardware is not serious unless it comes with independent funding, "We'd like to buy X, Y, and Z."

Want them to do some variation? Convince them it moves the ball down the field to their goal—a self-sustaining city on Mars.

Edited July 29, 2022 by tater

[Exoscientist]

38 minutes ago, tater said:

Exactly. The optimization here is cost. Cost per kg to LEO, cost to the surface of Mars or the Moon.

If the vehicles is reusable, that cost is the operational cost, plus propellant cost. Current F9 to LEO is ~$5000/kg retail (rideshare is $5500, cheaper w/larger mass). They are talking about costs as low as 10s of dollars per kg to LEO. So what if they launch 20-50X more mass for a mission, if it costs 1/300 per kg for that mass?

From a NASA perspective, the initial HLS cost is already known and fixed. $2.9B for the test mission, and the crew mission. Call it $1.5B per landing. NASA would pay more than that for any of the competing designs—we saw their proposals. So 10s of tons of cargo, plus crew for LESS than BO/Dynetics to land a few hundred kg, plus crew.

 Since NASA is paying SpaceX $3 billion for 2 to 3 landings, in effect NASA is paying $1 billion to $1.5 per landing. The use of the already built Ariane 5/6 would be a small fraction of that.

  Robert Clark

[tater]

Just now, Exoscientist said:

 Since NASA is paying SpaceX $3 billion for 2 to 3 landings, in effect NASA is paying $1 billion to $1.5 per landing. The use of the already built Ariane 5/6 would be a small fraction of that.

They are spending $4B per SLS launch in addition to that, and the SLS part doesn't do anything interesting—and in fact is obviated if HLS actually works.

If HLS works, they can do as many Moon landings as they like for ~$1-2B each, maybe less. 1 commercial crew vehicle to ferry crew to LEO, the same HLS takes them to the Moon and back as long as it has lifespan.

Also, WRT goals for SpaceX, they are getting paid to move the crew part down the field. They need to make a crew section for their final Starship to Mars. Getting some billions, plus some operational experience with HLS is absolutely in line with their goals. Just like they learned booster landing with boosters that other people had already paid for.

[Beccab]

46 minutes ago, Exoscientist said:

 Since NASA is paying SpaceX $3 billion for 2 to 3 landings, in effect NASA is paying $1 billion to $1.5 per landing. The use of the already built Ariane 5/6 would be a small fraction of that.

  Robert Clark

You're seriously including development funds in the per flight cost? Good to know that NASA spent 42 billion dollars (adjusted for inflation) for every lunar landing in the Apollo program

[Exoscientist]

 

 There are 3 MAJOR problems with using the overlarge Starship as the lunar and Mars landers.

1.)As we discussed, this approach would be highly inefficient in accordance to the key measure of launch size for large space projects. For the lunar missions 20 to 40 times larger than what was needed for the Apollo missions.

 And for the Mars missions, 5 times larger than the single launch Zubrin approach.

 Robert Zubrin discusses 2 other serious issues in his interview on The Space Show from Feb. 2020:

https://www.thespaceshow.com/show/11-feb-2020/broadcast-3459-dr.-robert-zubrin

2.)At about 30 minutes in, he discusses the thrust ejecta issue for a large lander on the Moon. An analysis showed the ejecta scaled at lander size to the 2.5th power. This paper estimate a 40 ton lander would throw up 470 tons of ejecta:

 

https://www.lpi.usra.edu/exploration/publications/MetzgerEtAl_SSERVI ESF2019_LanderPlumeEjecta.pdf

 The Starship weighs 100 tons dry. Give it a cargo of 100 tons. It also needs to return to the Gateway, so give it 100 tons propellant. The landed mass is now 300 tons. This is 7.5 times more than the 40 ton lander estimate used in the paper. The paper says the ejecta scales by the 2.5th power. So the ejecta is greater by a factor of 7.5^2.5 = 154, which brings the ejecta mass to 154*470 = 72,000 tons.

 Worse, from the methane/lox high exhaust speed the ejecta would have enough speed to escape the Moon’s gravity. A large proportion of the 72,000 tons of ejecta would be headed toward Earth.

  SpaceX claims to address this problem by using thrusters high up. But the physics seem to argue against this working. If high up and directed outward at an angle, that would prevent the crater being directly below the rocket. But while spreading the thrust outwards would reduce the impact thrust on any small area,  the total area would be larger resulting in just as much ejecta.

  Actually, it conceivably could be worse. The proportion of thrust directed downward still has to be the same to cancel out the vehicles gravity. But if a large proportion of thrust is thrown away, being directed outward, the total thrust has to be larger than before. This means you need a larger propellant load than before, and so a larger lander, and so a worse ejecta problem.

 Note also, ejecta means mass is sent back in the direction towards the thrust. SpaceX is attempting to prevent a crater directly below by angling the thrust outwards. But this will cause some ejecta to head back towards the lander also. How much? It could be tons. It could tens of tons. It could be thousands of tons. We don’t know. 

 3.) Zubrin notes in the interview that to run the plants to produce the return propellant on Mars would take 10 football fields worth of solar cells or a nuclear power plant. This would take an inordinate amount of cargo mass to be sent to Mars to produce the return propellant. 

 Marcus House in his video series also discusses the problem, and considers it so daunting for the Starship that we would be better off just transporting the return propellant from Earth, obviating the advantage of the Mars Direct approach of getting the return propellant from Mars.

 

  Robert Clark

[tater]

34 minutes ago, Exoscientist said:

1.)As we discussed, this approach would be highly inefficient in accordance to the key measure of launch size for large space projects. For the lunar missions 20 to 40 times larger than what was needed for the Apollo missions.

Launch size is irrelevant. Cost per delivered crew/cargo to the surface is the only thing that matters. If Zubrin wants something smaller, he can start his own rocket company, or buy one launched by Starship as cargo.

 

34 minutes ago, Exoscientist said:

2.)At about 30 minutes in, he discusses the thrust ejecta issue for a large lander on the Moon. An analysis showed the ejecta scaled at lander size to the 2.5th power. This paper estimate a 40 ton lander would throw up 470 tons of ejecta:

This is a legitimate concern, and I think Metzger is working with them on this. The current HLS design has the landing engines not just canted, but well up on the vehicle.

For continued operations at a base, building a landing pad would be useful. This is far more straightforward if the vehicle has a decent cargo capacity.

 

35 minutes ago, Exoscientist said:

3.) Zubrin notes in the interview that to run the plants to produce the return propellant on Mars would take 10 football fields worth of solar cells or a nuclear power plant. This would take an inordinate amount of cargo mass to be sent to Mars to produce the return propellant. 

ISRU issues are real, certainly, and they will have to figure that out before they attempt a sortie mission.

The amount of cargo is most importantly measured in terms of the cost delivered to the surface.

It's difficult to calculate the total cost of dev for a different lander, then getting it to Mars. Perseverance cost ~$2.3M/kg to get to Mars, and it's based on other rovers, not developed from nothing (and <10% of that was launch cost). A 40t lander using that cost guestimate would be $92B to the surface. ~$23B if we count the whole Perseverance spacecraft as landed mass (skycrane, aeroshell, etc). SpaceX can send a bunch of 1-way Starships for that kind of money. Alternately, a sortie version might have stretched tanks—and a bunch of cargo vehicles landed there first.

The goal is not a Mars Direct, though, their kooky goal is to not leave.

[KSK]

Regarding the ejecta issue, I can think of one source of data for more directly quantifying the amount of loose regolith available to be ejected, and that’s the core sample tubes taken during Apollo and the mission transcripts describing the depth to which they could be pushed before hammering was required.

There’s also been experimental thermal cycling work done on Earth, aimed at understanding the structure of the regolith and how it got to be quite so compacted.

I’d be surprised if either approach would give an exact answer but they might help constrain the model or assumptions used to analyse the plume images. As it is, that paper acknowledges that they’re using the worst case scenario in the absence of anything better.

[KSK]

I would also question how applicable an analysis of the Apollo ejecta is to HLS, given that they’ll be caused by two different engines with different exhaust velocities and different temperatures.

With that said, if some rando on the internet (which would be me) can think of these questions, then I imagine they’ve already been considered in substantially more detail by the actual experts.

Finally, a quick search https://curator.jsc.nasa.gov/lunar/letss/regolith.pdf

finds a regolith density of 1.5g per cubic centimetre. So 470 tonnes of ejecta has a volume of approximately 313 cubic metres, or an area of landscape a little under 18m by 18m down to a depth of 1m.

For reference, the LM was about 9.4 m across with landing legs deployed.

I know that 470 tonne figure was scaled up for a 40 tonne lander, but that volume of ejecta seems wildly out of kilter with Apollo flight experience.

72,000 tonnes of ejecta would seem to be a rather unfeasible volume of material to be ejected by one lander.

[tater]

 

Ejecta is a legit concern, but the person to pay attention to is Phil Metzger.

 

[SOXBLOX]

Ummm.... no. Even if the real world acted like KSP, where you can drag and drop components and they magically click together, and you can just add some struts to hold everything together, this wouldn't work. But the real world is waaaaay more complicated. The idea presented sounds a lot like something my six-year-old nephew came up with and showed me yesterday. Just sayin'...

[Exoscientist]

 Here’s the Silverbird Astronautics estimates for the payload capacity using the Ariane 5 as the upper stage. The specifications shown below, with the 5-segment SRB data estimated by 25% scale up of the Space Shuttle SRB’s data.

 And the results for the LEO payload:

 The estimated payload for TLI is found by putting -1.0 in for the hyperbolic C³ value for “Escape trajectory” field. This is a number that indicates it’s just below escape velocity for a free return trajectory around the Moon in case the mission has to be aborted.

 So both the LEO payload of 150 tons and the TLI payload of 60 tons are above even the Block 2 payload capacity that would use advanced carbon fiber casing for the SRB’s.

 Input data taken from: 

 

 

Edited August 6, 2022 by Exoscientist
Added image for TLI payload.

[tater]

There's a zero percent chance of this happening.

I would say it is more interesting to consider cislunar architectures using existing, soon to exist, and plausible vehicles already under development. Not cobbled together KSP style, but each vehicle contributing something by itself.

Existing:

SLS Block 1

Falcon 9

Falcon Heavy

Delta IV Heavy

Soon to exist:

Starship

Vulcan

New Glenn

Plausible under development:

SLS Block 1b

Neutron

Terran R (? this is more far-fetched they have yet to do anything at all)

Edited August 5, 2022 by tater