it would probably work but.....not practical. The SRB's are expensive and the politics is definitely depressing but I have decided I have to keep my eye on the prize. Musk said in the above article that "the path by which I hope to get there is to get the public enthusiastic about the possibility, then translate that into legislative pressure so that Congress hands us a Mars mandate". The core of the problem and a good reason to press forward with SpaceX. While the goals define the lift requirements, there are different architectures to meet those goals. Those architectures define the size of heavy lift needed. The trade space is multiple launches for the mass on orbit of a really heavy launcher. There are cost restraints that define that space as well. Griffin chose a variant of Zubrin's Mars Direct architecture for Mars, and a variant of the Apollo architecture for the Moon. His choice of the manned Orion vehicle size was indicative of his architectures. On the other hand, the use of L2 for lunar operations and the use of some variant of Dr. Aldrin's Mars cycler (say the old Soviet TMK architectures) are far more cost effective architectures. Further, Griffin never understood the separation of LEO manned vehicles from BEO manned vehicles. The use of 5 segment SRBs has been extensively discussed by others far more capable than myself at nasaspaceflight.com, and the problems with their use discussed there, in particular their cost problems. They were examined extensively