Also: NASA built a grand total of 18 Saturn V stacks. Then they shut down the production lines. With just 18 vehicles, completed years before the actual flight

Also: NASA built a grand total of 18 Saturn V stacks. Then they shut down the production lines. With just 18 vehicles, completed years before the actual flight missions, each and every one of them was a prototype: the rocket engineers working on them had worked on multiple prototype missiles before, and a whole lot of snags and bugs were hand-patched on each vehicle. Even if we could magic up a complete set of designs and build new production lines based on them, we'd have lost a chunk of the hands-on knowledge of how to fix problems with the design (stuff that wasn't recorded by a process that predated ISO9000 and similar QA protocols). Also, people tend to over-estimate the SV stack. As it happened, in its first iteration it was barely capable of the mission -- the LEM came in overweight, and only the fact that the SV out-performed its design specs by a couple of percent made the Block 1 lunar missions possible. (By Block 2 -- Apollo 15-17 -- they'd tweaked enough things that they could fly a heavier LEM with the lunar rover kit and additional supplies.) In contrast, you might find Musk's plans for Falcon Heavy interesting: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falcon_Heavy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falcon_Heavy 16,000Kg to translunar injection, 14,000Kg to Mars. It's not up to flying an Apollo mission profile (the LEM weighed 14,700Kg; the CSM stack 30,300Kg) but it's capable of putting a LEM-sized payload into Lunar orbit, and it might be possible to rig up some kind of lunar-orbit rendezvous profile surface mission using 2-3 Falcon Heavy launches.