Patrick Underwood wrote:
Energia-derived hardware is in use today by Lockheed, in the form of
the RD-180 Atlas engine, and by Boeing, as the Zenit Sea Launch
booster. The lox/kerosene engines are robust, efficient and familiar
to American engineers. The RD-0120 cryogenic engine is comparable in
performance to the SSME, but simpler and more rubust.

Agreed. The Energia has been launched only twice, however, which
is a quite low number to have confidenxe in it.

It is clear that the Moon/Mars program is going to be international,
with Russia playing a role.

A space intiative by Dubya is *not* repeat *not* going to be an
international effort. It would be unversally seen as US-prestige-project
(at least outside the US), and noone who could add something
substantially helpful is going to do so. Maybe some countries
like Botswana might add their full space expertise...

Assigning the heavy lifting job to the
Russians would provide a major boost for their economy and national
prestige (important not directly to the program but to Russia's
position in the world w.r.t. the US), and give us the payload
capability we need at almost certainly a lower cost than developing
new hardware in the US. I can't prove that last, but it makes sense,
looking at program costs and engineering salaries in the US versus
those in Russia. We might save billions of dollars by reviving the
Energia.

Russia does not have the money to start a Energia production line, and
it seems to be the consenus around here in ssp that the US are not
going to spend taxpayer money abroad. And heavy-lift capacity has both
a public-reltions angle (my launcher is bigger than yours) and a
military one as well, so it seems unlikely that this part of the
mission is going to be contracted outside the US.

The Energia is modular and adaptable to both side-mounted and inline
stack configurations, making it a very flexible launch system.

Both Boeing and Lockheed have worked with Russian engineers and
hardware to develop new profitable launch systems. So it is possible
they would not oppose such an arrangement with respect to Energia and
might even propose it as an option.

So go ahead, what's wrong with this picture? (I know you started
thinking up obvious counter-arguments at the first sentence.)

Well, You concentrated a bit too much on technology and economy. Both
do not seem to be relevant to those in Washington DC.

Regards

Robert Kitzmueller