Crocco was well aware of the planet's gravitational effects, but his mission profile is neither using them to accelerate nor decelerate, instead limiting itself to utilizing them for trajectory stabilizations. Still, it is mistakenly widely assumed that G. A. Crocco would have been the inventor of the gravity assist, which was first presented in 1961 by the American mathematician Michael Minovitch as a method to allow for the exploration of the outer planets which had been deemed nearly impossible beforehand. Pioneer 10, 11 and the Voyager probes would make use of this technique in the 1970s.