RWE also said:

“When Pres Bush’s space explortion initiative first came up I saw Buzz Aldrin on TV advocating a duplicate of Apollo using Shuttle SRBs.”

I suspect Buzz Aldrin was advocating this in the context of a manned Mars program. It is not common knowledge but a big limiter for a heavy payload (manned) Mars lander is the fairing diameter of the launcher to Low Earth Orbit. The martian atmosphere is just dense enough that a designer must worry about aerodynamics. However the martian atmosphere is so thin that getting something to slow down before whacking into the planet’s surface is very difficult. An obvious solution is to make the aeroshell really big and thus reduce the ballistic coefficient. We’ve learned over the years that on-orbit assembly is really not an option (too hard to do with guys in pressure suits). Consequently, a Mars lander needs to be launched as a single piece thus requiring a really big launcher. People have been trying to work around this with deployable decelerators, e.g. ballutes, etc. However ballutes are a very dodgy technology. You really don’t want something flapping around at Mach 10. The decelerator really needs to be rock solid with a well defined thermal protection system.