spacester: Why not just simply have NASA contract out to either companies such as Boeing or LM to upgrade their already EELV Heavy designs? They have both the tools and the experience to do this. Also, both Boeing and/or LM have designed the Common Booster Cores for either the Delta IV Heavy or the Atlas V Heavy to be mass manufactured. The plants are already in place. <br /><br />Just as an example the Delta IV could have some 4 CBC's spaced around a central (perhaps larger) CBC. I know that Rocketdyne which manufactures the RS68 engines for the Delta IV was running some preliminary thoughts on upgrading the current RS68 from 665,000 pounds thrust to some 1 million pound thrust. If both upgrades were taken to the Delta IV (with an upgrade to the second stage as well) the Delta IV could very easily put 100,000+ pounds into LEO. <br /><br />I know that the Delta IV Heavy was originally designed to put 50,000 pounds into LEO for about $100 million. This comes out to $2,000 per pound to LEO, which is about 1/5th of the current rate. The EELV designs (and I believe that LM's Atlas V is also designed around the same cost premise) were not to be revolutionary, but were designed to use conservative state of the art designs to bring down the costs per pound to LEO to a much lower level than before. The Heavy designs were to replace the far more expensive Titan boosters for the airforce (the EELV projects were DOD, not NASA). If these designs were used either as they are or even to develop Super Heavy designs, and these designs were then launched at a reasonable rate of at least 6 per year (the more the better), then I don't see any reason why such designs could not bring the per pound to LEO down to even less than $1,000, which may not be exactly CATS in itself, but would be a 10x improvement over older launch vehicles!!<br /><br />With the current state of the EELV programs I do not see why this could not be done in concert with the development of the CEV in some fiv