
In fact, you probably want to avoid US Government anything for such a
project.  The pricetag is invariably too high, either in money or in
hassles.

The important thing to realize here is that the big cost of getting to
the Moon is getting into low Earth orbit.  Everything else is practically
down in the noise.  The only part of getting to the Moon that poses any
new problems, beyond what you face in low orbit, is the last 10km --
the actual landing -- and that is not immensely difficult.  Of course,
you *can* spend sagadollars (saga- is the metric prefix for beelyuns
and beelyuns) on things other than the launches, but you don't have to.

The major component of any realistic plan to go to the Moon cheaply (for
more than a brief visit, at least) is low-cost transport to Earth orbit.
For what it costs to launch one Shuttle or two Titan IVs, you can develop
a new launch system that will be considerably cheaper.  (Delta Clipper
might be a bit more expensive than this, perhaps, but there are less
ambitious ways of bringing costs down quite a bit.)  Any plan for doing
sustained lunar exploration using existing launch systems is wasting
money in a big way.

Given this, questions like whose launch facilities you use are *not* a
minor detail; they are very important to the cost of the launches, which
dominates the cost of the project.