And as a separate post:
It just drives me WILD when they talk about needing to spend billions on new hardware when we have a Saturn V standing up at Huntsville... The bird is man rated... The blueprints and the companies still exist and can start an assembly line with minimal delay - they should be able to deliver serial #2011-01 within 8 months. That beast will lift anything they want to put into orbit... Do it reliably... And do it for pennies on the dollar...
As far as the return system simply stack a larger version of the Apollo capsule on top of the load, as the launch/escape/return vehicle for the crew... This capsule system is proven 100% reliable as a return vehicle...
Beg the rooskies for transportation - arrrrrgh, my blood pressure...
denny-o
You're kidding right? Most of the people who built the thing are old and not in a position to work on a "new" Saturn V. Those who understand how the systems integrated and who designed the thing are mostly dead. Why spend a ton of money to rebuild the tooling to build a Saturn V, when we can take the time to spend a bit more money, and get something that's new and a more suitable system. Honestly, I don't think that we could get the moon in the next 8 years if we had all the money in the world. And what reason to we really have to go to the moon? I'll buy going to Mars/asteroids, but what's on the moon we haven't seen with people/robotics?
Quite frankly, we don't need a Saturn V sized vehicle that's man rated. We need a big cargo booster, to put a lander and TLI/TMI (Lunar or Martian insertion) stage in orbit. Then launch the people in the capsule on a smaller, man rated booster, like a Falcon 9 or maybe man-rated Delta IV/Atlas V.
Like it or not, we've used 4 launch systems to put people in orbit. The Soviets/Russians have used one, and started development on 2 more, that were canceled. Granted, they may not have done so by choice, but the R7 has saved them a ton of money over the course of the program. Heck, Sputnik was launched on an R7. From a reliability standpoint, I'd much rather ride on a Soyuz R7 derivative than a Space Shuttle, because they've had so many years to work out bugs on the thing. The entire STS was getting to the point where we could start to improve things, after collecting data over the course of 100 flights. Turns out it would be better to just build something better.