David Portree's Altair VI blog just posted an article on what I'll have to say was one of the more intriguing items to be considered for the Space Shuttles Get Away Special program.

It seems that some JPL staffers designed a spacecraft to carry a leftover Apollo gamma-ray spectrometer to the Moon that could be launched from a Get Away Special canister. It was ion driven and would have used a flight profile similar to SMART-1 to get to the Moon over a period of about two years.

It makes me wonder if anyone else considered something like this during the period that program was running (1976 -2003).

See: Altair VI: Lunar GAS(1987)