As usual with morning astro-gonzo, I took some time to walk to the gym and back. I've decided I disfavour Caryn Bailer-Jones's Crazy-Hermann. I'm not picking on her; the same applies to any two-stage proposals passing the Sun. And since 18 March 2021 such has competition, in the solar-assisted VASIMR, whose rocket is in use the whole journey.
My concern is the tank and engine used to boost the sail or the plutonium-electric-drive or whatever. Whither goeth ye booster? Say we can time the alignments such that an Earth station railguns all our stuff down to a Venus-intercepting trajectory, which then uses Venus' gravity to pull it further sunward, maybe even aerobraking. Let's say we're packing that sail which, itself, may adjust the perihelion near the Sun. The whole caboodle runs then in a nonenergetic trajectory with that Solar perihelion and aphelion, what, at Venus. At the Solar well the rocket burns the bulk of its propellant - to punch out the cargo and its own means of propulsion whatever that is. I don't think we're seeing the rest of that rocket again.
Luckily CBJ mooted an alternative: biëlliptic, which may or may not be the same as Theodore Edelbaum's three-pulse Oberth 1959. This equally works for high-to-low transfers; and she wants that 1/12 or even 1/16- AU perihelion at a near-Earth orbital energy. It's not like she plans to stay down there. I do have to warn that the chromosphere is 700000 km so 0.00468 AU. 0.0625-0.083 AU be skatin' corona.
The deal here is that the contraption before separation has an aphelion higher than its starting orbit, here Earth's. This suggests that after separation, we can see our initial now-spent rocket at 1 AU again. And if it goes from, I dunno, 0.06 to 1.94 AU then that is the same semimajor at Earth therefore the same period. We'll catch that craft the next Julian Year.
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