Can you correct me with space travel using orbits?

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livinlife

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lets say we are going from Earth to Jupiter
you cant go there in a straight line because it would take a lot of speed right?
so instead of going in straight line, we leave the Earth tangentially so that we can orbit around the sun which helps the rocket gain speed...we also leave the Earth at a certain angle and at a certain time so that by the time Jupiter is at a certain part of its orbit we too would be there

this isnt for a test or anything, we just learned it in class and i thought it was really interesting and i wanted to make sure i knew it...
 
Orbiting the sun doesn't gain any speed. If you set something in orbit, it comes back to the same speed. Instead, we use the movement of a planet we pass. You are attracted by a planet as you approach it, and then it moves out of the way so you don't get sucked back as much as you were pulled forward.

We usually move in two engine burns: the first to make the orbital ellipse to touch the desired orbit's radius, then another burn to turn that ellipse into a circle. It helps on the fuel economy to use a few tugs of planets' gravity along the way.
 
You missed out the need to travel nearly tangentially to the Earth's orbit and in the same direction as the Earth travels around the Sun to make use of the Earth's great velocity, and to gain velocity on the slower moving Jupiter which rotates in the same general direction.
 
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