Tom Cuddihy (to whom congratulations on his upcoming marriage are owed), inspired by some musings on the subject by Jon Goff, runs some numbers on reusing lunar landers, and finds that (unsurprisingly), it doesn’t make sense. At least with the assumptions that he uses.

The utility of reusable space transportation elements is heavily dependent on the cost of propellants in all of the transportation nodes through which they operate. If we are going to deliver all propellants from earth, to the surface of the moon, using chemical propulsion, then it’s not possible to justify reuse of the lander (and in fact it would be impossible to justify reuse of the crew module itself, except for the fact that we have to return crew, anyway). If we are to have a cost-effective cis-lunar transportation infrastructure, it’s not sufficient to get the cost of LEO delivery down (though it is certainly necessary). We also either need to manufacture propellants on the moon, or deliver them to L1 via low-thrust high-Isp tugs from LEO, or both.

This was discussed (I believe–at least I wrote a lengthy input to it) in the final Boeing report on the CE&R contract (a document that NASA apparently never even bothered to look at once Steidle was fired and they came up with ESAS).

OK, enough space blogging for a while. I’ve got to get back to work.