PB666

Deimos is even easier, and the astronauts would be able to land. Venus and Mercury have the advantage that they could take advantage of at least some ION drive dV for relatively low cost. For mars that is pretty much out of the question. Once you have ION and 2 to 4 kw per meter of insolance you can start thinking about ION driving anything, yeah you could prolly extract argon from Venus or use metals from Mercury. THe problem of supply chaining, assuming that lunar colony 1 ISRU can make metallic aluminum, and you can start making tanks and new facilities, within that assumpton is a huge (hands stretched out) and sophisticate forging and stamping operation. Once you make something you have to store it. Think legistically about what has to come from earth just for storage, then think about what has to come from earth to create storage (and we are talking big time operational management) SpaceXs 5000 people get 3 launches a year . . . . . imagine the support network required to get a factory on the moon that has a hatch that can fit a full sized fuel tank or rocket engine through it. If you are talking gases you could make a long truss and meter diameter spherical tanks that can be assembled outside. Aluminum does not weld well either, its one of those things for tanks you might want things that can be welded in the vacuum of space with a fairly compact assembly facility. ISRU right now is a work in progress, check out NASAs site. http://isru.nasa.gov/ So yeah, lowering the cost per kg of fuel is an important thing. We have docking ports, we have the ability to build stations and to link ships together, so if we need a bunch of dV to get to mars, you are better off with an in orbital factory and a cheapest possible supply chain from earth. As for hydrogen, If you have a presence in the Western gulf, just build a production platform in about 2 years, make some commitments and someone is going to drill deepwater close enough to the platform, trade platform usage for methane (which they would give you anyway rather than pay the pipeline fees to onshore), you have all the hydrogen potential you would ever want, for free. You would make money off the production platform, you'de get free methane you could have a landing pad that does not rock, and a second potential lauchsite. You could use the methane as an energy source to purify oxygen (saving money on methane transport).

When they release the payload the weight of the rocket suddenly decreases. The equation for dV is equal to ISP * ln(starting weight/ending weight). Imagine then that you remove 8/10th of the ending weight and use the reamining fuel to drop the rocket to around mach 5 and allow the spoilers and the engine to slow the craft down with increasing atmospheric pressure. If you watch the technical video I supplied, the give callouts on when the burnback burns start the burn only for a few seconds, probably at a lower thrust, that slows them down. Elon was concerned about this (the video frybert supplied just after my link), he basically threw out that heating is the cube of velocity, so his major concern was slowing the booster down only enough such that the spoliers and the engine seats did not overheat. One of my projects today is to look up the v^3 equation for heating.

With regard to exploitation, you left out possibly the most important point, we have samples from the moon and we know very well now what we have to do to convert those crude minerals into usable materials. You can even take some of these and try it out of small scale. Also the moon has the highest surface densities of usable energy of any satellited in the inner solar system. Since Venus is pretty much out of the question and has no satellites with current technology and landing on a Mercurian polar crater would be tough in many kinds of ways (not to mention dV required), this only leaves earth crossing asteroids and the moon with comparable or higher energy densities. The surface of the moon is stable and not subject to disruptive tidal forces from earth (no earthquakes or cavitations to speak of). With regard to the martian satellites, the exterior satellite may not have a stable surface because of its small size Phobos - radius - 11 km. Surface gravity - 0.0057 (581 microg). Advantage escape velocity is 11.5 m/s Advantage could potentally accept horizontal landers and mass accelerated take offs. Advantage could provide a staging area for mars missions complete with laid out solar panels. Advantage no dust storms. The moon travels around the planet every 11 hours so it is possible to have a greenhouse on the sun facing side. Advantage 3.5+/3.5h- hour light cycle for sun facing surface (synchronous) less need for batteries. Greenhouses possible, it a stable site can be found Advantage no atmosphere - no wind storms, solar panels should not get dusted over (like mars), greenhouses also. Advantage is basically on equitorial trajectory, there are launch windows from mars that allow almost direct single orbit interception, so from that point phobos is a good candidate for staging fuel for mars return missions. It could be a mars filling station [Mexxon] Disadvantage health situation because of microg. Disadvantage mining situation because surface is not gravitational rounded, may be too lose to burrow into the planet Disadvantage the proximity to Mars and its low relative mass might make surface operations dangerous. Disadvantage no atmosphere, and no magnetic field, meaning very strong flux toward conversion of surface energy into loss of elements on the right side of the periodic table. Disadvantage insolance is fractional (0.362) to the earth or moon. Approximately 0.476 kW/ meter about 300w/meter of that exploitable for energy production, at current efficiencies is about 120 w/meter, but because of the extremely low gravity we could reduce the thickness of the panels to a fraction required on earth, we could send fairly light weight panels to these moons and supply alot of power. The problem here is that you would need step transformers and radiators close to a cluster of panels to boost the voltage otherwise you would have a huge mass of wires carrying small amounts of power. Deimos - 5 to 8 km. Surface gravity - 308 microg ( spectra, albedos and densities similar to those of a C- or D-type asteroid-wikipedia) Basically similar to Phobos, ... Deimos's orbit is nearly circular and is close to Mars's equatorial plane. Advantage - Deimos is so relatively easy to get from high earth orbit it is strange that we do not have extensive equipment already on Deimos, in terms of C-D class asteroids it would not be too challenging to bring material back. Advantage - Deimos is further from mars gravity well, easier to get to from earth particularly when an earth mission is traveling a minimal transect at apogee its orbital velocity is slower than mars, but it could be more easily picked up by diemos as it transects Mars. Adantage - A great place to stage supplies for deep system missions, short period comet intercepts, etc. It could also be a great place to bring gathered materials from comets its low surface escape potentials means you could simply bury comets under the soil and store them in thin walled containers. Disadvantage - Soils looser than Phobos, surface is smoother, probably the effect of micrometeorites hitting its surface. Disadvantage - synchronous, its period is much longer than phobos with a 15h+/15h- phase. Disadvantage - Burying down in the loose surface maybe problematic. To reduce high energy solar radiation, particularly during solar storms the living quarters might need to draft earth moving equipment to move soil followed by landing the quarters, and then burying them under the till. Disadvantage - trivial gravity, health issue but can be compensated for with inertial equipement. It might also be considered an advantage, a single human could lift 300,000 kg (albeit hideously slow). You could just land housing anywhere and the astronauts could move them with basically twine as handles. Moving deimos (regolith) of would be tricky, you couldn.t use a shovel. If I was a serious private concern desirous about creating a manned mars mission and I needed a proving ground, my first step would be a sample return mission (robotic) from Deimos. So once I had established a colony on the moon and working toward getting ISRU working, I would have unmmaned sample return mission to Deimos going on and I would have that material sent to scientist to see what the prospects are. The next mission would be a manned mission to Deimos and an unmanned sample return mission from Phobos. I might even be looking for asteroid ejecta on these satellites derived from Mars. There are immediate advantages for taking on 70's like Mars satellite sample gathering missions and manned missions to the regions, not economic but from a space or private concern they could make a profit by lowering the cost of these missions and getting the government as a buyer. I think this is within the reach of SpaceX with their current technology, provided the robotics are public sourced. As I say repeated its often not the issue of one or the other, if we really want to see a meaningful (usefully scientific and engineering) manned mars in our lifetime, we need to do all. The problem is getting a funder on board and now it would seem lowering the cost as part of the process. Space X showed us on Friday that they could rapidly decrease the turnover time on the high payload MEO and HEO missions, the will have a pad in canaveral and one in Bocachica, they can have several launches that haul the materials into LEO that without to much engineering get stuff to either of the Martian satellites.

So you have a welder making a stage 1 rocket engine that is carrying a couple of million dollar payload, some cases much more, and of course failure means higher insurance rates and potential loss of business (in a more competitive markets), are you going to hire a starting level welder and pay him $20/hour (40,000 dollars per year). Take a look at base pay for offshore oil industry, that will give you a good idea where salaries skilled laborers are. Of course they have people at the management sites that do janatorial work (which can be contracted out), landscaping, etc. But even here, when you have to final assemble a rocket's payload fairings and cap in a clean area you are also thinking about upgrading the salaries of the lowest level people also. For the Mars missions, for example, everything that reaches Mars orbit has to be free of Earth critters. There is not much elbow room for the untrained in these industries.

http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-35996813 Well i guess you can hypothesize anything into existence,mbut it seems reasonable, basically what they are saying is there is a cold Neptune out there somewhere.

Concerning density, Yeah i saw that on wikipedia surface gravity is mu/r^2 That is to say surface gravity is the inverse square of the distance tonthe center of th point mass if you reduce a body to a point mass, and at the point you have a light, then the intensity of the light and the pull of gravity absolutely correlate with radius. This is probably a reflection of the fact that both are transmitted as fields. Potential Energy is different. Energy, the escape energy for any non-orbiting object is u/r. If you place the object in an orbit of say a, then the escape potential is 0.5mu/a. The problem with escpe energy is that its only relevant for objects in non-inertial reference frames or in the case of an object in an eccentrity =1 in which the mass is a point source. If we only look at non-inertia objects escape energy is 0.5mu/a.

But that just shows the point, because it had a lifetime service capability, it was possible to think outside the box when it came to repair and later upgrades. Hubble is old, there is no doubt about that, but lagrangian L2 is used by these new scopes because a particukar attribute, they need to stay as cool and uniformly insolated as poosible, iirc, JWSt needs its detector at 7'k. But the problem is that to do that they have built a highly complex recycling system that will add another weak point to the machines lifetime. The other thing, JWST is not up, hope everything works well, but this is space. It does not need to be humans, if the gyros can be modularized into the designs you could send a service moduke wit a robot to L2 that does scheduled replacements, and in the case if keplar, helium replacement. Technically ion drives can get you from LEO to L2 provide you a small amount of chemical rocket to fire a a couple of points. Here's the bottom line, the most productive scientific feature of our space program is the long distance observation capability, no single instrument suffices anymore for complete observations. It is great we have ground instuments that can help, but because of hubble they have gotten better. The entire spectrum runs from radiowave to ultragamma, includes the cosmic ray observatories, and a growing team of neutrino observatories here on Earth, there are times you want many of these capabilities on the same objects. As a consequence you need redundancy in these systems. You want overlapping capabilites. you could argue that, 25 years ago, hubble was an expensive mistake, it has in fact been the most successful science gathering mission, we have to think about its cost versus how many man hours spent on Earth pouring over its data, which will continue long after its dead. If we think about these scopes this way, it is obvious we need more.

That is probably right, iirc after two years they lost a couple. This tells us that the stabilization equipment was of not robust design. Of course its already behind its designed liftime, and basically limping for the last five years. These telescopes need a service or replacement program, until we can get things that last 100 years (even solar panels lose about half their power in 50 years), we need tonhave a replacement program; the big one will be hubble, when that finally goes there will be a huge gap in our light telescopic capability. We have now no ability to repair or replace. By definition it would be a not like-kind replacement, unless a shuttle comparable comes about, even so no upgrade or repair capability. JWSt is great, but its really far into IR. Imagine that the graviton hunters find evidence of two black holes merging close by, or a supernova about to blow, you want to view from all spectra, but the hubble is no longer there.

Right but the framework of the argument is not set up properly, the idea is that you have a rigid space that either has momentum do to mass or thrust do to some force application push the object through a non-rigid volume The are several ways to go, wecan ask the question what happens is if we were to increase the pressure of the gas, it goes into the idea of titration, if you are traveling through a very low density gas or plasma, at high speed what happens to individual molecukes, for example does hydrogen reflect elastically or does is ablate even if only one molecule strikes a flawless structure, like a diamond lattice. The answer to this is probably both, some reflect, and some displace. What happens as you increase density? Then there is the math question, if every rigid volume must have a leading edge or surface, what happens with the surface of the leading edge decreases. IOW what if we make the leading edge a point, when we do that we might not realized that we have stepped into a messy domain of quantum dynamics, that in itself is a project. But we can address something, because the rigity has to have momentum, and that implies mass, to create a moment of rigity at least two molecules would need to be bonded or linked, and for it to be a volume implies at least a tetrahedral. So if the objects momentum is given by its mass, and the mass falls along a single dimension line that follows a point, the the gas ca interact with points along the line. . . . . side friction, the pressure of the gass and its temperature are pushing the molecules (their electrons) in the gas to strick the line causing its moleculs to absorb, reflect and possibly displace a rigidities constituants. Quantum mechanics tells us that for a line, nomatter how perfect is composed of quanta whose position at the quantum scale cannot be rigidly defined. So that the electrons of a gas molecule moving in the direction of the side of something might entirely miss a collision or slam directly into and be knocked free of the charged nucleus that binds it. Ocassionally,mwith high enough energy two nuclei might come close enough to reflect.. Thus in trying to reduce drag to zero a critical problem is exposed within the implicit rigity. The de broglie equations point this out that everything has a frequency, they vibrate,the fields can interact if close enough and transfer momentum. Even the most recent studies indicate that quantum transfers can occur across several atoms distances. So there is no way to avoid the base question, in the real world how can you make a object so slippery it would not creat drag. That things that compse the rigity will not interact with the molecules of the gas, the only possible answer is that the object is smaller than a quanta volume and/or its not massive/energetic which is to say its not an object. There are ways to trick the system -rf frequency to displace gas in front of the objects motion,mproblem is rf creates thrust against the motion of travel. Heating up the gas to 10,000'K would get rid of the mach affect compression and reduce its density according to pV = n RT, but the problem is that the gas is now plasma, it is a fireball. -lasers, again to move the fireball away from the surface of the ship. Bsically what these are doing is saying that there was a dense volume of gas to be entered , but our machines reduced the density of the gas to the point its effects are hard to detect or emits the same as the evacuated controls.

I Think they knew this would a have happened sooner or later, it was hobbling around on one leg for the last few years, so I would say its a miracle it has lasted this long. Not to fear, hubble is still there and JWST is on its way soon.

The answer to that question is that there is no surface that could withstand striking the atmosphere at that speed even at oblique angle. The hardest substance we know carbon which could create the best surface, the diamond lattice, is a gas about 2000'C which means it could tolerate speeds up to maybe 3000 m/s The surface would pit after reaching the degassing temperature at which point the surface would no longer be oblique at all points It would pit, and there would be a huge explosion and the ship would dissappear in a nuclear blast type of cloud. Every nose piece has a point that is flat, that point will explode the second it hits 14 PSI gas traveling at 30,000 m/s. SR71 blackbird is one of the sleekest jet ever created, the underwing and leading edges get hot enough to boil water at mach 3. There is no space craft without a leading edge, to say that the craft has no coefficient of drag is to say that it is volumeless, because every volume will create drag when pushed against another volume.

Uranium and Thorium are lithophiles not siderophiles, they tend to comibe with mantle and crustal elements. Uranium cannot diisolve through iron or coalesce from iron, particles of uranium would remain interdispersed in the core unable to concentrate, once the core solified sonwould these contaminants.

http://imgur.com/mc2GOIK

So who exactly is going to build a, what's the name? "we still love you", landing barge for the game? its "Of course, I still love you", there should be some kind of rule about naming boats.

Colder earth means longer event, means more likely to happen, means risk of a non-recoverable event more likely.

I does not appear this was posted skip ahead like 9 minutes more like skip ahead 15-20 minutes, lol. Is it an optical illusion it looks like the distal edge of the F9 2nd stage is flexing and bulging.

Reiterate what bf said. When i used to use google as a browser the first was r/r*******s and rather than fish through the other psuedolinks i would go through that and log into my imgur album page. I replaced google with duck-duck go and all those NSFW links onto imgur dissappeared. Unfortunately the porn is a large attractor to imgur viewers and porn is the most lucrative business on the net, i use a vigorus popup blocker to block alot of this stuff, but on my imgur album i see no adds. The nature of the net is what it is, if you read reddit, that which is the norm on most of their front pages is pretty much offensive to my generation. But the problem is if you hide from this you become a back row spectator to modern life, and you create a generation gap between yourself and younger people.

Nww if they can find a barge that doesn't rock with the waves. That was quite an impressive landing, and I'm not easily impressed; although they did miss the circular target just thought I would point that out . .. . . Because the cost is a matter of fixed cost and variable cost, you want variable cost, but they have to consider, particularly since this is not fully researched in the realm of fixed cost that has to be divided amongst all future missions involving landing gear. They need a bigger more stable landing platform, particularly if they are going to reland in white-chop boca chica swells.

CO2 is highly attracted to cold water, this is the reason for the poly-decadal carbon sink that so frustrated climate scientist. Atmosheric CO2 from volcanos is a turnover phenomena, and a large contributer is the subduction zones with deep benthic stores of unoxidized carbon, if earth were to lose a large portion of its O2 then that carbon output in ash would not be oxidized to CO2, it would simply end up as complex carbon such as CN or SCN or soot. If earth were to lose its Oxygen by magnetic field loss, then you have a completely different earth, it would not be earth any more, it would be like the difference between neo-Mars and mars 100 million years after most of its atmosphere is stripped away. The subduction zones would eventually lose their detrital sources of carbon and stable carbon would end up in other minerals. The evidence of the earth actually doing it comes from an Earth that is in its current orbit, that is to say there is no proof or certainty that if you moved the orbit 10 million miles further out, that it would recover. CO2 is replinished from the Methane from life and geological sources, this splits hairs because methane can be trapped in psuedo shale from the Hadean and Early Archean Eras, it can also be from shales from Archean and later eras. The difference is that from the later periods the other organics will spike (such as propane, butane, and benzene).

You are trying to prove my point. 13.7 billion years ago there was no life, 8 billion years ago there probably was no life, and the life that exists 13.7 light years from our current position in space is immaterial to the question CH4 in the presense of SO4, a product of FeS04 oxidation can be utilized by certain archeaobacteria. If high levels of Methane existed while 02 levels rose, the earth might not now have an atmosphere. CH4 + 3O2 = 2H20 + CO2 (Kaboom). Lived down the road from a house where Methane leaked under the house, someone flipped the light switch and pretty much the house was scattered about a 1/4 mile circle You can bet as soon as O2 levels rise, methane disappears fast, those sulfate loving bacteria on the sea floor. There are also bacteria that reverse the process they can methane out of simple sugars, scavenging the oxygen for metabolism. Yes, the person inside wearing virtual reality goggles and engaging in science fantasy. Black holes the right size don't just walk into your solar system and say hello, in the life of the universe the space-time frequency of a black hole the right size has a probability near absolute zero. A critical point gets overlooked while we are handwaving about the Earth while we hand-wave, the earth is what it is, not something else it might have been. This arguement seems silly but then lets go about predicting how much Net water will be released from Antartica in the Next 200 years, or how far down the greenland Ice sheet will melt. If you take Earth say 24,000 years ago and moved it out say 10 million kilometers (1/15th of its current a) in its orbit and then ask the question. 1. Does the current ice age end. 2. Do humans advance to start cultivating Secale cereale, Einkorn both transition grains to Triticum aestivum 3. Does Bos taurus primagenious get domesticate 4. Does rice farming begin in India and Burma and move into China (Probably not, the current rice farming areas would be at too high of an elevation). Does wet rice farming begin. Now we can ask the same question 1. Life gets started on Earth, and earths lignite forests grow, and are knocked over by a few asteroid events locking most of the carbon into coal beds for millions of years 2. Snow ball earth occurs 3. Never exits or exits say 500 million years later. Twice in earths history the freeze condition has happened, if earth was just a little cooler, it might not have exited. We actually do not know enough about the earth to model its paleoclimatology going back 3.3 billion years under variant circumstances of a. The obvious reply is that we don't know enough to say that the zone couldn't be bigger, and I would answer, the earth is what it is, not something else. We are here and we, after extensive searching have not seen another earth, so the answer might be other than its bad telescopes and interpretations. Imagine a snow ball earth just 10 degrees cooler. Snow ball earth occurs. The albedo increases. The ice layer thickens The tides slow down, amplitudes fall, the moon stops its long radial march. The earths rotation stops slowing down The dynamo inside the earth slows down The amorphous region outside the solid core gets less energy begins to crystalize in places, solidfy Earths magnetic field begins to disappear Oxygen is lost, Sublimation of the ice occurs, further cooling the surface. Eventually small ponds of water. Because we lost oxygen there is no oxidant left to burn Carbon locked in Oxygenation event carbon sinks, CO2 cannot rise and warm things up. The sun finally ages enough to heat up the ice to melt it; however its too late, the atmosphere is too thin to support life. Maybe some of those lifeless earths are the result of a life process that just stopped because the long-term was simply not OK.

Nope put mars far out of it and retain the lower boundary. Here so my original point, for any given starting planet, given its satellites, is star, its surface composition, it gas. The best of these (meaning having alot of surface water) might have a habitable zone in the conservative zone, but for the planets we have observed at a distance, best case scenarios are few and far between, most of these that do not have the right gas and water compositions will have smallish habitable zones because the temperature extremes are too great for life. That zone could be where earth is, it could be closer to Mars, but whereever it is the zone of the planets a is much smaller than the conservative zone and much smaller than the zone in which earth can support life, on average. We make our assumption based on earth, but as of yet we have not spotted anything close to something that has the surface composition like earth (meaning 70% coverage by water), thats a rather big problem to have to overcome. Or let me put it like this, from an organic chemistry point of view, which is what i am by training and education, Talking about life can be laid out like quantum physics lays out the standard model, from a organic chemistry point of view. Under many conditions you can create simple organic molecules and a slew or random organic molecules, and life can benefit from these and start. Under many fewer conditions you can have non-living systems systematically producing these molecules as a resource stream that can support life, and life can evolve somewhat (We can imagine these circumstances at pools that get struck by lightning or the non-thermodynamic products produced in hot pressurized aqueous beds that lie deep under a planet) Some may call this habitable, I don't, the problem is that under these circumstances life at its simplest levels continually evolves, but then dies out. So you are better off that a circumstance where life starts and then say freezes solid, desiccate, is carbonized by radiation and eventually becomes part of a sediment. But in terms of humans walking over planting a flag and 1000 years living on the surface and breathing the air, nope, your still going to be in a dead zone. You might say, aha but somewhere deep in that planet there is an archabacteria like species that has lived for 5 billion years, that is a living monocellular organism - - - - - - what we know about earth is that the potential energy organic chemistry of life has a high dependency on the allospecific transmission of resources - put simply all life on earth is dependent on other life not of its germ line, that is a major reason it took so long to evolve during the early period. So do you want to say living thing or life, inhabited or habitable, meaning other things can be added to this system and in doing so would turn living into life. So habitable represents a smaller set of planets, planets in which system can partition and share nutrients without have the holosystem does not interrupt and kill off some aspect of the transfer. On earth just about every species can be replaced by something that wanders in to fulfill that species role (confining argument to the organic, things like autoplants and rocket makers do not qualify). Under a much smaller set of circumstances life starts, there is some photosynthesis, or maybe too much solar radiation, that only a small portion of the planet is permanently habitable, for example the poles of really warm planets or the hot plumes equator of really cold planets, or underwater for planets that have slow rotations where the surface and surface waters constantly freeze and thaw as part of its diurnal cycle. We could actually settle and inhabit these places, with technologies - a habitable planet with fractuous preexisting life, and no intelligent or sentient life. Under a very tiny set of circumstances where a planet has water, has a moon, a solid core surrounded by a viscous amorphous region that produces a magnetic field, has about 50 to 90% coverage with water, very close to the amount of insolance that the earth recieves, and over a very tiny set of time frames might we find sentient life. If you take any planet and say, aha, it can support life under some circumstance, and you take only the stars were that planet can support life IOW A.Given a rock that might support life B. Given a star that might allow that particular rock to support life C1. There is a confined set of orbits and eccentricities in which that rock will support life sometime in that stars existence Given all the possible C1. C2. There is even a more confined set that will continuously support life over much of the stars life time Given all possible C2. C3. There is a much more confined set that would be habitable from our perspective Given all possible C3 C4. There is a much much more confined set that could potentially develope sentient life.

Rosetta had something like seven encounters, its problem is it has to work with planets that have atmosperes. But not like ksp, much bigger wells and atmospheres are relatively thin.

That conservative zone i consider optimistic, shrink that zone by 80%, that would be conservative.

Yes indeed, Ike is an unplanned rendevous, the problem in ksp is the patched conics only allows two layers, so that once acceleration inserted into ike you could only guess about the moho overlay, i provided as much dv as i could imagine for moho and then had to complete using ike. The odd thing is i did this manuever twice and ike got in the way both times. The satellites relatively large size and close orbit and the fact you have to cross through it twice to oberth ike increases the probability greatly the it will interfere with the patched conics. the other problem with ksp is that if you target while still inside another system you cannot see the nodes, and the graphics just arent good enough, even on a high resolution 32" monitor to see the two orbital planes clearly. You can do some, in one try i got 1.5 degrees, in another try 0. I could have actually gotten more efftect here, the problem was i was trying to keep the dV of the craft as high as possible, i have gotten up to 40k withou using ion drive systems, which would be totally reasonable with a moho flyby, but would be feckless with a moho oberth effect. If you had ion drive in ths case you would want to have a much more robust engine for the ike power burn and get as low in the kerbol orbit as the heat radiators can take, about 1 GM, once below 2 GM you full throttle the ion droves and leave them. Both duna, ike and moho are non ideal. with jool you can get some really good retro dV for doing a kerbol flyby, but for moho, duna and ike will suffice. If you can manage to get a jool flyby on the escape trajectory this is also good. The problem is that the ion drives will be useless. ION drives are actually the reason i gave this example, provided something like VASMIR becomes a reality, i could invision a sun tolerant system traveling down to mercury, using some sort of weight efficient thruster and ion drives, which wont work behind mercury, unless you carry fairly large batteries or nuclear, blaster a booster at perigee. Then get an oberth that exits traveling at a slight negative radial, with the ions on full throttle for the entire time it takes to get to venus. At this point it would release vasmir and argon tanks, and use the remaing metal ion system and solar panels to push itsel out of our system.

I'm finding this a bit hard to understand, why would you land the winged launch vehicle under the landing site, if you do anything more than provide a launch booster, the vehicle should have west to east momentum, the landing site should be to the east by at least a few miles. mach 6 is only something like 2000 m/s but the orbital payload would need 7900 m/s depending on gas temperature and composition.