Fastest Spacecraft Ever?!?, Which one is it? Options

[Toma B]

There was statement that recently launched New Horizons is the fastest spacecraft to leave Earth. The velocity was 16.2 km/s relative to the Earth according to "Jonathan's Space Report".

After the Star 48B burn, the payload had reached escape velocity not only with respect to the Earth but also relative to the Sun (The velocity was 16.2 km/s relative to the Earth and I estimate an asymptotic velocity of 12.3 km/s, corresponding to 42.6 km/s relative to the Sun...

So:
New Horizons is fastest to leave Earth at 16.2 km/s (relative to Earth).
Voyager-1 is fastest to leave Solar System at 17.374 km/s (relative to Sun).

Now that is OK. but what is this?
Today's "Astronomy Picture of the Day" features launch of New Horizons and in text bellow image is one particularly interesting link to "Guinness world of records"...
Guinness world of records;
There "Mr. Guinness" claims that the fastest spacecrafts ever, were two Solar probes "Helios 1&2"...According to him those spacecrafts had speed of 252,800 km/h which is staggering 70.2 km/s...BUT RELATIVE TO WHAT?????
Can somebody explain this?

[ljk4-1]

My concern is that the VSE is going to become Apollo Mark 2, where it takes
away resources for real science missions just to put a few extra humans on
the Moon for slightly longer stays.

Then the politicians of 2020 or so decide it is not worth the effort, or the public
gets bored again, or both, and we end up with a few more flags and footprints,
the Moon is abandonded for another 40 years, manned Mars missions get
pushed even farther into the distant future, and robotic planetary missions
lose the momentum they had regained in the 1990s and 2000s. All for yet
another stunt to show the world just how great the USA is.

[Stephen]

My concern is that the VSE is going to become Apollo Mark 2, where it takes
away resources for real science missions just to put a few extra humans on
the Moon for slightly longer stays.

That sounds an awful lot like the grumbles you used to find (and maybe still find) on Usenet about the Apollo missions not being real science missions, usually from those seeking to show how unmanned missions do "real science" ever so much better.

Then the politicians of 2020 or so decide it is not worth the effort, or the public
gets bored again, or both, and we end up with a few more flags and footprints,
the Moon is abandonded for another 40 years, manned Mars missions get
pushed even farther into the distant future, and robotic planetary missions
lose the momentum they had regained in the 1990s and 2000s. All for yet
another stunt to show the world just how great the USA is.

If the VSE were only "another stunt to show the world just how great the USA is" America would not be sending people back to the Moon. It would be sending them straight to Mars instead.

The real danger from the politicians to the VSE (IMO) is that:

1. They may wind it back before the first CEV is even sent to the Moon (much as their funding cuts forced changes to the Shuttle and the ISS).
2. If the Moon is reached, the politicians--be it the president or Congress or both--may give NASA an unwelcome choice: you can keep going to the Moon or you start heading to Mars, but not both at the same time.

That last choice is arguably what happened to Apollo. The Apollo program died because America was not prepared to pay for a manned lunar program *and* the development of the Shuttle at the same time. NASA was allowed to do one or the other but not both. That naturally meant an invidious choice had to be made.

Compare that to the present situation since the VSE was announced. NASA is presently in more or less the position it would have faced in 1972 had the Shuttle been given the go-ahead while at the same time it has also been authorised to keep sending Apollo missions to the Moon for a few years longer--*but* without being given the funding necessary to fully cover both. It goes without saying that one consequence would surely have been that other NASA programs, especially expensive unmanned ones like Viking and Voyager with no connection to Apollo or to the Shuttle, would have been hit as NASA took funding from them to make up the shortfall in the Shuttle and/or Apollo programs.

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Stephen