Where to ship the mercury

I took a gym break to ponder the morning gonzo. I am now considering: where to use it. Assuming maximum exhaust velocity if only to work with Tsiolkovsky, the exhaust will be hyperbolic relative to Earth. Although simple stationkeeping with crude engines might lower this velocity.

Given that, Earth's whole orbital-range up to Earth/Moon gravitational-balance - TLL1 - is out. Don't even stick a depot up there.

Further that Earth/Moon libration halo is out. Stationkeeping means mercury might get squirted at not-enough-speed so, down here. That goes for TLL3 too. And although the trojan haloes around TLL4&5 don't get stationkept, they might be taking on cargo for outside journeys; no depot for you!

TLL2 on the other hand starts on the dark side of the moon so seems better. I don't see much of it ending up in the TLL4-5 haloes; maybe STL4-5 but feh. Also there's just not as much room around TLL2 for thousands of satellites.

Nobody's using the Moon and if we were to use it, we'd be buried under a meter of regolith anyway. In lunar orbit, I admit that an equatorial circuit is dangerous for Earth. Polar, less so.

Past the Moon exists an orbit over our shared barycentre. This shouldn't be a problem for Earth at all. Here's where Orbit Fab can keep their various toxic propellants. None of the solterran libration-haloes worry me either.

Moving on to planet-to-planet: Hohmann is more a thrust thing than an I_sp thing... normally. But we often hope to shave time and this often requires planetary-assist. These in-flight adjustments use propellant. Mercury might work between uninhabited planets like, er, Mercury and also Venus. Admittedly that rules out Earth-assist trajectories, like Cassini's.

Hohmann also approaches a cycler trajectory for Earth-Mars (VISIT: 7 synods, 15 years) and Venus-Earth (Hop David: 5 synods, 8 years). Between approaches does come an offset so requiring adjustment. Same for the various other cyclers except that they need to be thrusted even more to reangle them per run. In fact the idea was to do this in midrange inner-planet orbit. We can inflict mercury upon Venus for the Venus-Earth cyclers (especially such as don't quite intersect Earth) but we're not allowed it for Earth-Mars. In theory sails might assist the offset; probably not any Earth/Mars but I do ponder Venus/Earth especially Hohmann.

COLD FLUID 11/8: For nuclear waste but will apply to any other elemental toxin. Anyway we got better plans for nukes.