Yes. I can't find any phyiological account of the time frame in hemimetabolous insects like mantids, but you can observe it in the dragonfly that crawls out of the water one evening, breaks out of its final nymphal skin and is ready to fly away next morning after much pumping of its wings. You can see the same thing in lots of holometabolous insects, from flies to butterflies. The drying-out period, when the chitin hardens after molting, is a period of great vulnerability to predation, so there will be a tendency to select for rapid hardening, all else being equal.
