re: Interstellar - things you LOVED and HATED about this movie

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Because they didn't want to waste that spacecraft's very limited fuel, so they a complete launch so that vehicle could get out into space on a full tank.

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Geez...Yall are missing the point. I'm not saying use the ranger used on the missions. They obviously had the technology the didn't require multistage rockets. Just be consistent. FFS... read the article I linked. An excerpt...

"Rather than launch straight from Earth to Jupiter, which would be impossible for their mission profile, they do the very sensible thing, and transfer spacecraft once in Earth orbit. There they dock with their waiting interplanetary (actually intergalactic) ship, the Endurance, which has been launched in pieces and assembled by robots.

Since it takes a lot of fuel to overcome the gravitational potential of the Earth, they do what every manned mission has done, and use a multistage vehicle. Most of what you are carrying is fuel, so it makes sense to ditch pieces of your spacecraft once they are empty, thereby lightening the load. This even becomes a major plot point towards the end of the film.

INTERSTELLAR- Rocket

That’s all great, except that for the entire middle of the film they ignore this. At some point they say that Miller’s planet, has 1.3 times Earth’s gravity. That means that it would take an even bigger multi-stage rocket than it took to launch from Earth to get off the surface. Yet they just use their little single-stage Ranger spacecraft to blast off again.

I understand why Nolan did this. He wanted to invoke the pride and wonder of the Apollo program in the Earth-based launch sequence. And yet they couldn’t repeat that on the planet, because obviously there was no infrastructure there. Well guess what, that means you don’t get to have the whole Apollo launch sequence in the first place! Sometimes movies have to make compromises on cool things for the sake of passing the laugh test. It would have been fine for the whole film to have just started out with advanced single-stage to orbit vehicles. But once you establish something else, you need to have internal consistency."