China does not have a Saturn V class heavy lift so it will be impossible for China to beat us to the moon.

It’s impossible for China to beat us to the Moon unless they use a Wayback Machine to land before July 20, 1969.

Give me a break. They won’t be setting up any bases on the moon or going anywhere else with this method. They are exploring. We are ahead of them right now with our heavy lift infrastructure and hardware.

Anything to shout down the person telling the truth.

“I want to do Apollo again”

Doubtful. They probably have the hypergolics because like the Russians they use them for ICBMs and want to have commonality. The decisive property is that hypergolics are earth storable, not that they are space storable, although they’re that too of course and although that is a nice side-effect. But be that as it may, given that they intend to use hypergolics, they don’t need an HLV to go beyond LEO. Just as NASA doesn’t need an HLV to go beyond LEO. Not even if they want to do it as soon as possible and don’t want to wait for cryogenic depots, because as you yourself have now stated too, they could use hypergolics for that.

You’ve shot yourself in the foot with your argument.

Wrong. The program was overfunded to the tune of $2.4 billion (or 17%) more than what was promised in the FY05 VSE budget:

http://www.transterrestrial.com/?p=34154

“It was and is in the form of liberty…”

Liberty repeats the mistake of the original, 4-segment Ares I design and its SSME-powered upper-stage. Griffin and Horowitz wasted a year finding out the hard way that hydrogen engines designed for ground starts make for very poor upper-stage engines. Astrium is about to learn the same lesson.

“… a nearly perfect design for a crew launch vehicle.”

There’s nothing “perfect” about a design that:

— Nearly guarantees crew death in the first minute of an abort.

http://www.physorg.com/news167210662.html

— Relies on a “recoverable” first-stage that is actually unrecoverable to meet its reliability and cost goals.

http://www.universetoday.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/dent.jpg

“The hobby rocket is the anti-thesis of practical design with an ineffective escape system,”

Like the Orion escape system?

http://www.universetoday.com/17118/nasa-releases-images-and-video-of-orion-failed-parachute-test/

“expendable clusters of low power engines and inferior upper stage propellants.”

There is an existing, man-rated launch vehicle that employs five “engine clusters” on its first-stage with four nozzles each — or 20 thrust chambers — and an RP-1 powered upper stage. It’s called Soyuz. With 1,700 successful launches under its belt, it’s hardly “impractical”.

“You get what you pay for- there is no cheap.”

There is much cheaper than Ares I. Two EELV families with 40-odd successful launches under their belt were developed for about a fifth of the taxpayer dollars expended on Ares I.

FWIW…

“The hobby rocket”

As Inigo Montoya would say: “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”

Gary/Virgil, we only talk about commercial aerospace companies here, so head on over to the Estes rocket forum if you want to talk about hobby rockets.

What a maroon.

“I was underfunded year after year and this imposed huge penalties on the final tally.”

Here is the family history of the Ares I rocket, which never flew:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ares_I_Evolution.jpg

This is the reason why Ares I went so far over budget, and one of the major causes of that was the inflexibility of the SRM. Notice how they couldn’t decide on how many SRM segments they needed, or how big the 2nd stage needed to be. So much for Griffin’s Safe, Simple and Soon.

“It was and is in the form of liberty a nearly perfect design for a crew launch vehicle.”

It’s kind of hard to assert that something is the perfect design when no one is willing to sign up to use it. Let us know if that changes, but until then, and until they commit to actually building it, it’s a paper rocket.

In the meantime SpaceX has broken ground on their launchpad for Falcon Heavy, and has announced a price for the initial launches. And since the majority of the Falcon Heavy hardware has flown successfully as the Falcon 9, it’s real hardware.

We’ll see who gets to space first.

I was underfunded year after year and this imposed huge penalties on the final tally. It was and is in the form of liberty a nearly perfect design for a crew launch vehicle.

The hobby rocket is the anti-thesis of practical design with an ineffective escape system, expendable clusters of low power engines, and inferior upper stage propellants.

You get what you pay for- there is no cheap.