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Soyuz To The Moon?
colonist writes "The Americans won the first race, but the Russians might beat them back to the moon. The reliable Soyuz, currently the only means of transport to the International Space Station, may send tourists on a voyage around the moon (gallery of illustrations). Constellation Services International's plans call for the Soyuz spacecraft to dock with a logistics module and an upper stage. The upper stage fires to send the Soyuz on a free-return circumlunar trajectory."
The Soviets planned on launching a Soyuz atop a Proton launcher (currently used as a heavy cargo launcher, roughly equivalent payload to the Space Shuttle) to put a Soyuz into a free-return trajectory around the moon.
The Proton was soviet man-rated in the 1960s, and the design has been extraordinarily succesful over the past 30+ years, so it's not unreasonable to imagine that this process could be completed again.
The economical way to do this would probably be to man-rate it as part of a commercial launch. It wouldn't be free, but it would certainly be cheaper then developing a new heavy lift rocket or buying Titan IVB, the only other rocket in use with equivalent throw. Of course, this is complicated by the Titan IVB assembly line shut down, so you'd probably want to look at the EELV, but that's not flying yet.
The Soyuz is built for the high-g reentry that a lunar return entails, they just need to pull their old heatshield design out of mothballs and modernize it.
It would be nice if the site admins posted some kind of explanation of why it's happening.