I use kerbal engineer redux. It's pretty helpful, especially with phase angles. It'd be a lot harder to launch interplanetary missions without it, for me at least.
I watched the final launch of Discovery in 2013 from near Cape Canaveral, unfortunately I was not privy to what I was seeing at the time. Truly a wasted opportunity, but at least I saw it.
If anyone here has read The Case for Mars by Robert Zubrin, I think that lays it out quite nicely. Mars Direct seems like a brilliant plan to me but I'm not exactly an expert.
Godspeed in finding the mythical, and indeed, magical boulder. Although, I'm not too sure how someone found it in the first place that'd be quite a bit of searching.