"George William Herbert" wrote in message
...
Dave O'Neill dave @ NOSPAM atomicrazor . com wrote:
A Proton/Ariane5/etc... size launcher can soft land around 6,000kg
of cargo on the surface at a reasonable cost for supply purposes.

Six tons?

Could you document that and/or provide numbers?

I've been working on lunar missions for some time and get
payloads around three tons off a Proton, A5, D-IV etc.

Checking on The Encylopedia, the last sample return mission massed 5,800kg's
and was launched using the Proton. I didn't do the sums myself but a
collegue did them and was pretty sure you could manage things with a Proton.

I could see if I kept the numbers if you want. They were sketchy though, we
were looking at a proof of concept, and frankly, we couldn't make the
numbers add up even with 6 tonnes.

Dave