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Yeah lots of ways of doing this. You could fit a LEO-to-moon transport vehicle, as described by Robert Zubrin, on a Falcon Heavy. Basically you use Falcon9 to
by socialdemocrat 5y ago
Yeah lots of ways of doing this. You could fit a LEO-to-moon transport vehicle, as described by Robert Zubrin, on a Falcon Heavy.
Basically you use Falcon9 to get in and out of LEO using Dragon.
A Falcon Heavy can push a larger space craft into LEO and it saves weight by the fact that a LEO-to-moon vehicle doesn't need heath shield and other stuff which makes a Dragon capsule heavier.
And with Falcons being cheap you could even send a whole bunch of LEO-to-moon vehicles straight to the moon surface, as well as just dump fuel tanks there.
SpaceX has a lot of these and can build them quite cheaply, so the mission will have a lot more built in safety. E.g. if you got an extra lunar ascent vehicle sitting on the landing site already before astronauts arrive, you have extra redundancy.