Welcome to SDC, nice posting but using the shuttle to go to the moon has been discussed extensivelly here before. Its just not practical to bring a winged vehicle all the way to the moon. If shuttle were not retiring, it could have been utilized for the upcoming Constellation program rather than build the Ares LVs.<br /><br />Keep in mind it took the Apollo third stage to move the 45 ton mass of the Apollo CSM/LM to the moon. The shuttle mass is 125 tons plus or minus a few and as mentioned here earlier, it would take more than a payload bay full of propellant to get it to the moon, and you'd need to bring it back to earth. The shuttle could not land on the moon without a runway or additional rockets for vertical descent. Once all this is factored in, the impracticality of it becomes apparent. <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> <p><strong>My borrowed quote for the time being:</strong></p><p><em>There are three kinds of people in life. Those who make it happen, those who watch it happen...and those who do not know what happened.</em></p> </div>