1. SSME for upper stage use-- yeah "potential issues" were game stoppers on Constellation-- found that adapting SSME for airstarting or restarting in space basically meant designing it new from scratch!
2. History of Zenit/Energia... (goody! Let's use Russian boosters on our return to the Moon vehicle!)
3. Comparison of US/ Russian hardware...
4. NLS w/ Energia strap on boosters...
5. Saturn w/ Energia boosters... (methinks Werner Von Braun and Sergei Korolev were BOTH spinning in their graves on that one! Or maybe sitting around talking and having a good laugh?)
6. How bout if we just used Russian engines on US built NLS or Saturn revived cores??
7. SEI LV specs... the first one is interesting, the NLS core with 8 Energia boosters... something almost identical was proposed by an independent team inside and outside of NASA about the time the Constellation program got the ax... It was called "Neptune" and would have used an ET-derived core (gotta be shuttle derived, even if we make it 33 feet in diameter now!) surrounded by 8 Atlas V's as Liquid Rocket Boosters... performance was phenomenal with 4 SSME's on the core stage... The middle one is the same rocket but with "what if we made four boosters out of shuttle ET's with a pair of RD-170's from Atlas V on each??" The one on the right is "how about a 33 foot (Saturn sized) core with four SSME's on it surrounded by 6 Energia boosters??" Gotta love Lego rockets!
8. NLS core with 8 Energia LRB's... the Russians planned to build this exact same rocket-- they called it "Vulkan"... All they really had to do was beef up the core stage of Energia and dump the ogive shaped upper LOX tank, going cylindrical to put the payload up on top (where it belongs) instead of hanging off the side like Energia... (which was designed to loft their Buran shuttle, as well as side-mount payloads like their Polyus space battle station)...
9. Issues/Concerns using Russian hardware... gee lemme think...
10. How about shuttle derived?? Yep huge cluster of giant SRB's, that's the ticket!
