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The reason why Soyuz is out of the running as CEV: its not built here, and would give Russia veto power over our space program.
The reason why Shenzou is ou of the running as CEV: its not built here, and infact is built by the place that most Americans are tired of importing from, and which still happens to be a repressive Communist regieme, and would give them veto power over our space program too.
Neither one of them is a serious contender.
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Your SRB rocket isn't ever going to be quite as cheap as you want it to be. The reason? The overhead costs of operating KSC, the one place in the world that is capable of launching such a vehicle. Each shot is going to take about $50-60M of materials costs, and lets say a modest 100% markup for the ground crew and you are looking at a price only a bit lower then a Delta Medium-B+ 45. Now, toss in the price of the tug needed to get those LMe tanks from the booster to the Lunar fuel depot, and you are looking at $130M for each unit. Toss in another few million for the actual Lunar fuel depot, amoratized over each flight, and we're talking $150M each... Not that hot, and not good enough.
...Nowhere near that hot compared to Shuttle-II bringing up the payload for under 1/3rd the price to a LEO/L1 cycler. Wait for the real deal, no pretenders feigning to be "cheap American expendables!" launched by the accursed Shuttle Army.
[i]"The power of accurate observation is often called cynicism by those that do not have it." - George Bernard Shaw[/i]
[i]The glass is at 50% of capacity[/i]
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If that half a Delta-IV SHLV shot is coming out of your surface payload budget, then it sure as heck is unreasonable.
A reuseable system doesn't make sense unless you really can make use of it and need it. If we're only sending a few manned missions a year, and no RLV on the Earth end or fuel supply on the Lunar end exsists, then you are still having to pay too much for your rocket fuel since it has to be launched on a big expendable. The cost for your rocket fuel will be so large compared to the cost of your vehicle, that you won't save any money, but you will wind up mortally crippling the performance of each mission.
The idea is to put all your pieces together in orbit first, hopefully through an automated process.
That way the "cost per mission" is just the cost of the launch of your fuel and your CEV.
So if we spend $2-3 billion to put together a reuseable "lunar shuttle", and launch 4 missions a year at a cost of $250 million (for launcher, fuel module, and CEV refit) each your already down to $500-750 million total cost per mission, which will continue to go down with each additional mission. Thats already cheaper than Apollo, and with time will be half the cost of the shuttle.
And consider that thats for Spiral 2 missions (4-15 days moonside). I figure well do those for a couple years untill we develope the base modules. At which point we can still use the above system to shuttle crews back and forth for Spiral 3 missions, were we may have the capability to create fuel on the spot, which will reduce our Earth launch costs.
"Yes, I was going to give this astronaut selection my best shot, I was determined when the NASA proctologist looked up my ass, he would see pipes so dazzling he would ask the nurse to get his sunglasses."
---Shuttle Astronaut Mike Mullane
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