I think designing a moon lander as an moon base is at best primitive and at worse more difficult than it should be. In general the smaller and lighter something is, the easier it will be to land it or launch it. Making it big enough to support a crew for two weeks all by itself can cause a lot of problems.

The bigger the Lander the more expensive it will be and you can design a Lander that is built to land cargo only and could be lofted via something like a Delta or an Atlas and sent straight to the moon or sent via ballistic trajectories or sent via solar electric propulsion. The slow boat methods increase the amount of mass that can be landed. The only thing a lunar crew needs (besides solving the darned radiation problem) is supplies like food, water, oxygen and perhaps some repair parts.
And at the cost of Apollo, constellation or even SLS you never can get past the sortie phase. Heck at the cost of both Constellation and SLS you can’t even get to the sortie phase. This is why commercial space is so important. It splits the costs over more parties than just NASA esp. the cost to launch.

As for an unmanned docking in BEO, ah we do it all the time at the ISS (Progress) and ATV. Did it to board to the ISS and every space station ever launched, doing it in BEO is no different than doing it in LEO. The only difference is that a failed docking could lead to loss of crew but that is the same risk as the Apollo mission.

Here is one way you could do lunar missions. Design a Lander more in line with Apollo (very short mission say only able to support a crew 3-7 days but able to be stored or supported via ground equipment longer). Send ahead supplies say solar panels and extra batteries for power, food, water, spare parts to enable longer missions. This is how space stations work. You don’t launch the crew with all the supplies needed for the mission and use specialized cargo craft like Progress, Dragon, Cygnus, HTV, and ATV extend the life of the mission. Spadis figures that Delta could land about 8MT on the moon; 8MT is enough to support a crew for at least a month or two.
A smarter move might be to leave your earth return vehicle at L1 or L2 so that you don’t have phasing issues and can leave the moon at anytime vs. LLO.

Apollo was a political stunt, but stunts do not make for expansion of humanity into space. Just a rail was needed to settle the west so is commercial launch and capabilities needed for humanity to go further into space.Without it all you can do is expensive stunts, and NASA does not even have the budget to do that.

Why is this ALWAYS so different when it comes to space … after 50 freakin years!

want cargo on the moon? get a bid .. just like EVERY item NASA orders on earth… just get a freakin bid for it.

“we need to land X amount of cargo on the moon, 4 times per year … how much?”

THAT is the way our space agency SHOULD be working .. the tech for the moon is DECADES old .. all NASA needs to do is publish a request for bids and let commercial figure out ALL THE REST.

Wait, it’s being said here that the reason to send humans beyond LEO is to see how bad the radiation environment is? Even if we had no rad sensors at all out there (and in fact we have loads), why in the WORLD would you want to send up a human as a sensor? Gee, we probably should send humans up beyond LEO to see if there is any air to breathe there. If they asphyxiate and don’t come back alive, they’ll be posthumous heroes for having established that the vacuum of space extends beyond LEO.

Oh, and we have a pretty good understanding of how the human body responds to various amounts of radiation.

This is a natural extension of the dumb arguments we hear about what you really need people to do in space.

NASA knows Congress isn’t going to allocate funds for a Moon program or any other “project of scale” so they made up a cheap mission but one that might give them some of the BEO experience they feel they need.

I think some people don’t like ARM is because they want a Moon program instead. Well I’m sorry, it’s not happening. Not with these bozos in Congress. And not with SLS, the damn thing is just going to cost too much to build and operate. I’m sorry but you folks need to learn some basic economics and apply that to the situation. And I’m pretty sure a new President isn’t going to change the situation that much. Money will still be tight and SLS will still be a sober Space Cadet’s nightmare.

There’s a 50 ton lifter due to come online within the next couple of years and the development has already been paid for. There’s a mad millionaire who wants to put his habitats on the moon and has already spent nearly a half of billion dollars developing them. that’s nearly half of a Moon program already there. And the “We Must Go Back To The Moon” crowd aren’t all over that and fighting to see those assets used? Maybe the “Back To The Moon” crowd are really just a “We Mainly Just Want To Argue About Going Back To The Moon” crowd.

Think about it folks, do you want results or is something else your motivation?

Laters…