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comment by am_Unition
am_Unition  ·  2757 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: SpaceX Interplanetary Transport System

Yeah, francopoli is right. You'd waste a fair bit of fuel decelerating to park at L4 or L5, and/or lengthen the total time of the trip unnecessarily. This on top of the fact that the station-keeping required to keep anything there would be fairly intensive. L1, L2, and L3 are "saddle" shaped (in gravitational potential) equilibriums, unstable in one dimension (radially), but L4 and L5 are unstable both radially and tangentially to the orbit. I can't think of anything that'd be gained by using Lagrange points to get to Mars, but it was a good exercise :).