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Interesting! If you want to avoid space assembly, you can always just refuel. Even that gets you far since in many cases propellants are a large proportion of

Interesting! If you want to avoid space assembly, you can always just refuel. Even that gets you far since in many cases propellants are a large proportion of spacecraft mass. But why would you avoid docking? Even Apollo had it as a critical part of the mission. Twice! (The CSM turned around and docked to the lunar module after translunar injection.)

Solarsail 11y ago
Well, the avoidance of docking was primarily because this was a thought experiment, not quite optimizing for a global optima. We wanted to see if a Mars mission could be mounted within those tight constraints, and set about with those constraints as unwavering. Why avoiding docking was one of them, was a requirement from Mars Direct. (Flipping through A Case For Mars for a minute wasn't enough to find the reasoning...) If you wanted to do a mission with minimal assembly but with docking... I'm not sure you could get a ship with a dry mass of <25T to launch to LEO. Say, with a sizeable upper stage for orbit insertion, habitat module and life support storage space (even with the food / water / fuel all brought up later). Even a fairly large Bigelow module, electrical equipment and pressurized space for food is going to be more than a Delta IV-H can take to LEO... And then an empty upper stage big enough needs a lot of volume. Maybe two flights for assembly, and then launch supplies up?