She isn’t assuming anything; you are assuming she is. She wrote an excellent opinion piece making good points, the crux of which is saying that NASA thinks such and such are what is necessary to approach the best odds of surviving spaceflight.

I was explaining this all to my mother the other night, and how the three pre-TLI orbits benefit and are necessary for life sciences checks, antipode alignment and system integrity confirmation; and then I explained free-return trajectory and so on — in the course of which I realized Isomething staggering, but…