Don't Reinvent the Wheel

The Shuttle-B concept, pictured at left, calls for a cargo-only or a small crew vehicle lifted by the rest of the shuttle system.
Going to the moon is going to require heavy-lift -- hundreds of metric tons need to be lifted out of the earth's gravity well. While I'm in favor of a little bit of new engineering, I'm fully aware that once you open the Pandora's Box of "new science", the wonks will drive your costs through the roof. So good luck to the NASA administrator trying to keep costs low and results high.
What new engineering would I support? How about using new materials and a railgun/mass-driver to launch cargo into LEO? The military is already working railguns -- some of these have suborbital performance characteristics. If you could build something that could launch, say ten metric tons, and a reusable capsule system to hold the payload, you could launch cargo all day long. The more you launched, the cheaper your cost to orbit would be.
Somebody somewhere needs to reduce cost-to-orbit. It is killing our exploration of outer space. Perhaps the government is not going to answer this problem -- it requires thinking outside the box. I do see a role however, for government -- perhaps as a "Super X Prize" sponsor for ONE technology to drastically reduce cost-to-orbit. The dozen or so programs NASA has now does not cut the mustard, and looks like an example of groupthink gone bad.