The word that should be rolling off tongues at NASA is a philosophy of “cumulative” space exploration. That is, every time a mission within the solar system takes place, it should build on, literally, missions that have happened before, and its mission should be used to build on those that happen after.
When a space station is built, one of its primary tasks is to construct an “interplanetary shuttle engine”, a big, robotic engine and fuel tank to take other spaceships from Earth to Moon and Mars and beyond, and back, itself remaining in space. This would permit the spaceships to carry a lot more of their own fuel and supplies.
When considering Lunar and Martian missions, the first missions should be nuclear powered robotic tunneling systems. By mining tunnels as habitats, you avoid a huge number of problems, as well as create a cumulative Lunar or Martian base, so missions there can be a lot longer and carry more and different supplies.
The mining can be done before humans arrive and after they leave, and while they are there, the mining robots nuclear power can be used to provide copious amounts of energy to the base.
Von Braun was pushing for this concept in the 60s. He wanted an Earth orbit rendezvous between the lunar lander and the crews, at a space station.
We were racing the Soviets at the time, so the idea was abandoned for the lunar orbit rendezvous between lander and command module.
The landers could have been reusable (if different from the LEM), and the space station could have been a stepping stone to more exploration.
The concept still seems to be on the back shelf gathering dust.
The tunneling machine concept is a good one, but maintaining any tlelmetry would be the hard part.