[papasmurf]

You see, I fell into the trap of thinking too conventionally. I was thinking of a “one size fits all” vehicle. My bad. The thought that it could be stored, and that we might need a separate vehicle for the different types of missions, never entered my mind.

And I call myself a creative thinker...pfftt!

[GonzoGOP]

It makes me unpopular, but I don't think we should be thinking about Mars until we have the political will to build nukes is space. Chemical rockets are too slow and too mass limited. Just try running a PC in a non-teperature controlled garage for two years. No way it is going to keep working, but this ship has to do just that. Take a lawnmower, hardly a delicate piece of high technology, fuel it up and let it sit for two years and then try to start it. That is exactly what Orion needs to do. After a year in space a person looses 15% of their bone mass even if they exercise for two hours each day. The crew will be up there for more than twice that long. Will they be incapacitated by the 3g or more shock of reentry?

Build something like the NERVA and you can cut the time in half, and have enough spare mass to spin up the ship for gravity. Also being a bigger ship you can carry more spare parts. Heck the old 1950's Project Orion was talking about throwing a ship the size of a destroyer to mars in only 90 days. It played heck with launch facilities, but sit on an A- Bomb and pull the trigger and you are definitely going someplace in one heck of a hurry. And you actually took less rads then with a chemical powered ship because it had enough spare mass for a proper solar storm shelter.