Boy, ask and ye shall receive. A few more posts like that, on a regular basis, Andrew, and I could retire. Unfortunately, this blog has a lousy pension plan.

And after y'all have read Andrew's post on Suborbital Day, head over to The Space Review, where Jeff Foust explains, once again, why we shouldn't build a new heavy-lift vehicle.

The Saturn 5 proved that heavy-lift vehicles can enable human exploration of the Moon. It’s tempting to go back to what worked, but different times require different solutions. In the 1960s, the Saturn 5 was the best option in an era where the goal was less to explore than Moon than to beat the Soviets. Today, with no real race against another superpower, the goal should be to blaze new trails into the solar system in such a way that others can follow. The Saturn 5 didn’t do that, and their modern equivalents may be similarly ill-suited to that task. If the long-term goal is, in the words of one advocacy organization, to “create a spacefaring civilization”, perhaps it’s time to leave the Saturn 5 and their ilk in the past, and seek a new approach.

While a Saturn 5 class vehicle may indeed be unecessary, something a bit bigger that an EELV heavy would be nice. Perhaps something in the 50 ton to LEO range.

I have heard there are plans for uprating the second stage of an EELV design to significantly boost its capacity and that these pland were presented to the Aldrige commission but have yet to see any slides of these proposals on the web.

Perhaps the answer lies somewhere inbetween as is so often the case in life.

Saturn was "best"? Funny, I always thought Orion was best. Guess it's a matter of what "best" means.

Thinking about Orion "Saturn by 1970", then taking a left turn at Fusion reactors... They say that the problem with fusion is containment... Hmmm isn't lack of containment what you want in a rocket motor?

Now that would be a "Torch Ship!"

Orion certainly redefines the meaning of heavy lift.

Credit where credit's due: 99.44% of that was Randall Clague of XCOR, with some edits by Pat Bahn of TGV. My contribution was cut 'n' paste. Which I did with masterful skill and grace, of course, but humility prevents me from taking all the credit :-)

If we must have a heavy lift vehicle for space exploration, there is a better way than recreating Saturn V or creating something like Shuttle C. Why not Titan Timberwind? Why not a nuclear upperstage booster? http://www.astronautix.com/lvs/timtitan.htm

The Titan Timberwind could deliver just as much payload to the Moon as a Saturn V. A modern version of Titan Timberwind would base itself off of one of the vehicles replacing Titan IV, either the Atlas V or the Delta IV.

There is no practical alternative to nuclear power for the needs of manned exploration of deep space, so why not exploit nuclear power for booster technology too?

Personally, I think we should have a major nuclear research program and should be moving away from fossil power plants to passively safe nuclear power plants. But, you can't have a rational discussion of nuclear safety in this country and haven't been able to for over 20 years. Heck, most news stories about nuclear waste will have some silly statement like "waste that will remain radioactive for [fill in here] thousand years." Virtually everything is radioactive and will be for billions of years. The question is HOW radioactive and they don't even begin to discuss that.

But even I would be very leary of an Orion drive craft. Aside from the treaty problems, it is unlikely that many will accept having hundreds of nukes flying over their heads. I wouldnt' be too concerned about a properly designed Nerva upper stage, but I'd be amazed if it would be politically acceptable. And controlled fusion rockets are decades away. Even they would probably be far too heavy for ground launch.

What we need are well designed reusable chemical rockets used frequently, like airliners. Then you can create a real space infrastructure.