Mode decision all over again?

So... for the moment, we have a goal of returning to the Moon. Let's
talk about the mode decision this time around.

Does anyone think that the state of the art has advanced such that a CEV
would be able to land without using a crasher stage? Apollo went the
route of making the landers really, really light and fragile, reducing
to the absolute the mass that had to go all the way to the surface.
Wouldn't you need something like a crasher stage to land the kind of
large, structurally strong elements you'd need when putting an outpost
together? At least, assuming that you're going to assemble this craft
with relatively few launches... (Remember, the outpost modules will
almost definitely have to be buried in the regolith to provide solar
flare protection, so not only will they have to be strong enough to
handle the pressure of dirt piled onto them, you'll also need to send
along something like a bulldozer, to dig the holes in the ground in
which you'll bury the modules. That's a lot of mass you HAVE TO land --
do you think you'll need crasher stages to land all that mass?)

I recall how ungainly and unwieldy the Apollo designers found the
crasher stage concept to be. And how difficult they felt it would be to
land a CSM on the moon. Do we have better ideas now that would make
landing a CEV that will be even larger and more massive easier than
landing a CSM would have been 35 years ago? What about crew stations --
do we land the crew flat on their backs? Do we give up the idea of
actually eyeballing the approach? Do we build a "porch" onto the CEV
and let the poor pilot crawl outside onto it so he/she can see while
landing? And how would that apply to a landing on a planet with an
atmosphere, like Mars?

Maybe a combination of EOR and LOR is the ticket this time around?
Putting an expedition craft together in LEO that includes both a lander
stage and an orbital outpost?

And another mode issue -- if we use an LOR mode, do we design the lander
and the mission such that the crew is going to stay on the surface while
the orbital craft returns to Earth? Sort of leaves you without a crew
escape vehicle (though "escape" is a touch more problematic from a
quarter of a million miles away), but it *does* mean that you can't get
a surface crew back to Earth until/unless you can send a new
"transport" back to lunar orbit.

I would think you want a mission profile that first goes into lunar
orbit and then descends to the surface. Aren't the options for landing
sites on a direct ascent trajectory awfully limited? The Russians kept
sending things to the Sea of Fertility because it was one of the few
places they could reach on a DA trajectory, IIRC... do we want to limit
the available landing sites by skipping orbital insertion? For that
matter, what type of profile lets you land near the South Pole, anyway?
I'm pretty sure that they're interested in trying that, so they can get
some lunar water to use for a variety of things. And during Apollo,
going as far south as Tycho was supposedly so difficult that your landed
LM weight would have to have been something like *thousands* of pounds
less than for the J missions they flew. How much more of a landed-
weight penalty do you incur landing near the Aitken Basin massifs?

It just seems to me that if you're going to design the CEV to be a
multi-mission vehicle, you have to decide whether or not it's going to
be a part of the landing stage. And if it is, does it *really* make
sense to take your heatshield and earth-return hardware all the way to
the luanr surface and back?

While creating a craft that goes to a destination, lands, takes off
again, and comes back home (all by itself, without added modules)
appeals on an emotional level, I just think that there were some good
reasons behind the original LOR mode decision. Why buy the necessity of
sending all the fuel needed for TEI, all the mechanisms not needed for
the surface mission, etc., all the way to the surface?

What do y'all think?

Doug