"Allen W. McDonnell" wrote in message
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"Greg D. Moore (Strider)" wrote in
message
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"Allen W. McDonnell" wrote in message
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Personally I would rather they delay the launch a year and get a
higher
power launch vehicle to deliver it sooner than currently planned. In
the
old days NASA managed to get probes to the planets quickly, these days
we
seem to always be doing half a dozen flyby's for cheap gravity assists
instead of just burning more fuel at the launch.

Even if it means the mission never gets funded?

And I think you overestimate exactly how quickly NASA got probes to
planets.

For one thing, we've never had an orbiter of Mercury. That takes a lot
of
work.


Why should mariner 10 in 1973 require 1 Venus flyby to set up 3 Mercury
flyby's and the 2004 Messenger mission require one Earth flyby, 2 Venus
flyby's and 3 Mercury flyby's before it actually goes into orbit in 2011?
Getting to Mercury is less energy intensive than getting to Jupiter.

Are you sure about that? I thought it was more intensive, since you
effectively have to lose all your momentum.

And going into orbit about a body is also more intensive then doing a flyby.


Using
'energy saver' orbits is fine so long as you have all the time in the
world,
but NASA has developed the IMO bad habit of selecting the cheapest orbits
no
matter what the time delay. To get people to vote and fund space missions
you have to give them pretty pictures to look at. Maybe NASA is smarter
than I think because the way they are doing Messenger they will get a nice
set of Earth pics and two sets of Venus pics to publish, but Venus and
Earth
are somewhat well known. Mercury is mostly still unknown territory so I
want the mission to get there and start Mercury science while I am still
alive and interested, not 7 years down the road when many things may have
changed in both my life and the world at large.


True, and consider how the scientists whose jobs depend on this feel.

However, more than pretty pictures, people look at the bottom line and
appear to want cheaper rather than faster.

Allen W.