Unless they add more hab/consumables storage modules to it, I can't imagine Gateway could keep a crew with normal personal space needs sane for more than a month. Which so happens to be the maximum designed mission time for any Artemis occupation of the gateway...
it should help them prepare for it.
Quote from: JacobTheInvestigator on 02/19/2021 08:43 amit should help them prepare for it. Indeed. One aspect of the cis-lunar gateway is that it will provide opportunities to conduct surface sorties that originate at an orbit only loosely associated with the planetary body being visited. If it turns out that kind of architecture works well from the perspective of the human participants, one could imagine similar missions to the surface of Mars from a similarly loosely associated Martian orbit. I don't know of an official DRM like that, but it isn't like NASA's final Mars DRM is set in stone or anything!(Note well that such architectures have been proposed for human exploration of the Martian moons.)
[...] in a world where Starship is the only Earth/Mars transport, a high-orbit gateway is of marginal utility. There might still be ways to use it that do help vs the baseline, but it's not a slam dunk. But if lunar ISRU pans out, Starship doesn't happen, or you want to do low-thrust transports, gateways become a lot more interesting.
What's your assessment of schemes where Starship is the only Earth/Mars transport but some of the oxygen it uses is produced on the lunar surface, presumably from ilmenite, with storage at a high lunar orbit depot? Granted it doesn't provide the complete solution for Starship propellant, but LOX is relatively easy to transport and store, and oxygen has other uses than being a propellant. Is such a depot really of only "marginal utility?"(Additionally the ilmenite approach allows production of metals on the lunar surface, and water too if you bring your own hydrogen. It also avoids the permanently-shadowed polar challenges....)
Slightly late, but here's the answer:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_Space_Transport