In-flight refueling has been suggested as a precursor to depots. With that, your lander would essentially be a depot, so there would not be a need for a separate vehicle. Make it fully reusable and you’d need something like 80-100 mT of propellant. And no, it wouldn’t be large because these propellants are nice and dense, unlike liquid hydrogen.

When have “the dollars” not “flowed freely” for Ares I? For this statement to be true, then the Ares I budget would have to have been cut at some point in the past. When has that happened?

“Its should be kind of obvious that budget cuts have delayed Ares I whether its PDR/CDR or all the rest of their major milestones.”

Yeah, it’s that multi-billion dollar budget that’s holding back the Ares I PDR, not technical issues like the fact that first-stage SRB fragments will burn through Orion’s parachutes in the event of an abort 30-60 seconds into flight with near-100% guarantee of Orion fratricide.

http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewsr.html?pid=31792

Just send more money…

“Ares I may be a bad design, I’m not qualified to say, I’d defer to those with years of experience designing, testing and building rockets.”

You don’t needs years of experience to figure this stuff out. What about low to negative mass margins, astronaut-shaking thrust oscillations, poor flight control, doubling or tripling costs, years behind schedule, and deadly launch abort scenarios doesn’t say “bad design”?

“Mr Valyn, the problem with prop depots is its never been done”

You do realize that ISS is part propellant depot and exchanges propellant with Soyuz, right?

“I say again, if he’s [President Obama] committed to humans outside the ISS, I’ll be surprised. So far I saw some vague talk about the moon, especially before the election.”

You do realize that the Moon and destinations beyond LEO were explicitly called out as one of the four major objectives in the White House’s terms of reference for the Augustine Committee, right?

FWIW…

“Mr Valyn, the problem with prop depots is its never been done”

That depends on how you define propellent depots. ISS has been refueled multiple times by Russian Progress cargo missions, and orbital refueling and storage is the heart of a propellant depot.

Even a simple hypergolic propellant depot which uses well settled operational technology could be a boon to many different lunar flight architectures. It isn’t necessary to have a liquid hydrogen depot to get good use out of the propellant depot concept. In fact, a hypergolic depot would probably fit better into a commercial heavy system by easing the difficulty of even small payload rockets to profitably deliver propellant to a depot.

Re: Heavy Lift Vehicles (or “BFR”)

Some think HLV are actually counterproductive to VSE, while NASA and others seem to think HLV are indispensable. I think HLV fall into the category of nice to have and not need to have. In fact nuclear thermal and/or electric propulsion rockets, aerocapture and ISRU are more enabling technologies than an HLV could be.

However, Griffin was right when he said we already have an HLV stack, the Space Shuttle, and it would be a waste to throw it away. But when a supposedly shuttle derived cargo HLV morphs into the Ares V behemoth, it’s gone too far, and become a clean-sheet design waste of money.

Fortunately it seems sanity has reasserted itself at NASA with the ‘Not The Shuttle C’ concept (officially called the Shuttle-Derived Heavy Lift Launch Vehicle). This concept makes perfect sense for a cargo launch vehicle, though not a crew launch vehicle IMHO.

The articles referenced on your NASAWatch site don’t use the term “not Shuttle-C”, nevertheless “NSC”.

And posts on bulletin boards are hardly definitive references for common terminology.

“US bulkhead, an engineering sample sure, but obviously an exact manufacturing of existing engineering”

The common bulkhead is another experimental article to save mass, one of several experiments that have to work in order for Ares I to meet its performance targets. It’s not development hardware and these experiments wouldn’t be needed on other vehicles. Five years into the program, other launch vehicle options available to NASA would by building flight hardware by now (or have flown).

“ATK is firing the first 5 segment CLV next month.”

Ground-test SRB articles (whether 4-segment for Shuttle or this 5-segment) differ significantly from flight articles. And even if they were usually identical, this 5-segment that will differ significantly from the propellant geometry and grain types currently planned for the flight article.

“Saying its not so in 500 words doesn’t make it so.”

Pretending that experimental articles — ones that won’t fly and that will likely change significantly in design or be replaced entirely after PDR and CDR — are the same thing as development or flight hardware doesn’t change reality.

At this point and for the next couple years (or more), Ares I is an everchanging paper design dependent on a number of experiments going right before the vehicle can move into development. The project has not settled on a design, has not moved into development, and may never do so even in the absence of the Augustine Committee review given the number and magnitude of problems it’s facing.

FWIW…