I'm picturing that the safe way forward is to send a 1000 day duration mission to LEO which would remain autonomous except in case of critical failure. Probably a series of them.
The article was very misleading there. The astronauts will only be in 0g for several months, at most. After that they'll be on Mars with its 0.3g which will be much more similar to Earth. Valery Polyakov [1] stayed in space for 438 days which is dramatically longer than any sort of normal transit period to or from Mars. He not only suffered 0 major issues from such a stay, but even briefly walked on Earth immediately after landing precisely to demonstrate that he would be fit to work on Mars even after that sort of time period.
There were never any efforts to surpass that stay because it's completely unnecessary.
