Falcon Heavy to the Moon!

The Crowlspace ^ | April 6,2011 | Adam Crowl

[jmcenanly]

Interesting design. With a slight modification a Falcon Heavy can orbit ~55 tons of propellant. Then a fully loaded Dragon Capsule can dock with it and use it to launch into a Lunar, or Halo, Orbit. A landing vehicle, preplaced in Low Lunar Orbit, or the Earth-Moon L-1 Point, can then finish the journey. All without using a gargantuan booster. At ~$100 million per launcher, plus another $100 million for the lander, and a Moon mission can be done for ~$500 million. A steal compared to the multi-billions of the Ares V program that the USA had committed to under GWB. A properly designed lander can then be kept at the ready for repeat missions, tanked up as required.

[jmcenanly]

There is a second part to this article http://crowlspace.com/?p=1070 as well as an article on going beyond the Moon http://crowlspace.com/?p=1070
Before someone asks about this being relevant to Article One Section 8 of the Constitution, this is a private company. They can go where they want.
If NASA, however, wants to be truly compliant, they can always reorganize as a fleet.

[Vaquero]

ping!

[ASOC]

After launch from Kazakhstan on Christmas day (1997), the Hughes 601HP communications satellite failed to execute its final burn, leaving it stranded in an unusable elliptical orbit with an orbit plane far from the equator. “It was a healthy spacecraft in a bad orbit. Mission over?

No, they used a free return lunar flyby to place the bird in a usable orbit.

Commerical space is more interesting...

[Yo-Yo]

SRBs are cheaper, have a higher power density, and now that the Shuttle program is winding down, production capacity is abundant.

Why go with 18 liquid fueled rocket motors?