Efficient transportation system for crew delivery to a lunar base

The paper proposes an alternative approach to providing an efficient transportation support for a lunar base after it has been deployed using the heavy launch vehicle (LV) Angara-A5V, to which end it suggests to use stations both in low-Earth and circumlunar orbits. The circumlunar station placed in a high circular orbit is to host a reusable lunar lander. The paper demonstrates that, by the proposed efficiency criterion, a transportations systems that uses the crew transportation spacecraft Orel for transfers between the stations exceeds by 13% the currently adopted concept based on two super-heavy LVs. Basing at a station in low-Earth orbit a reusable crew transportation spacecraft to be used as the vehicle for transfers will improve the efficiency of the alternative transportation system by as high as 42%.