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slipperydippery 5 days ago

The mission is wildly more complicated than the Apollo missions. There's a whole oddball-orbit space station that has to be placed as a way-station, for one thing, and none of that's happened yet (remember how long it took to build the ISS?). Also, landing all your return fuel instead of leaving it in orbit, so a way heavier lander (with a smaller return payload than Apollo!), which is a pain in the ass. Multiple space ships launched by different rocket systems involved. The SLS still has to be finished for it to go forward. Orbital refueling of large fuel tanks is a hard problem that remains unsolved, and this goes nowhere without fixing that. The contracts for the return vehicles are disturbingly light on parts about making sure they can reliably work, including surviving re-entry.

I'm with you. Not happening. We're more likely to come up with a totally different, simpler plan, and do that instead, before this happens.

stetrain 5 days ago | parent [-]

> landing all of your return fuel

The fuel that is landed is used to get back from the lunar surface to lunar orbit, not to return to Earth. That fuel stays with Orion in NRHO.