Quote:
Originally Posted by Fuzz
Ya, you just have to imagine how to even get started on that. Think of all the different materials and processes needed to make a craft able to survive in space. If the moon does have useful minerals, you'd still need to extract and process them, turn them into usable raw metals, form them into parts...just the materials to make the manufacturing facilities would require an unimaginable amount of energy to get them to orbit or the moon.
More realistically I think we still build the components on Earth, and find a way to extract and process fuels from in situ materials.
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Fuel is the obvious choice. No need to try and make titanium screws in orbit. Artemis weighs 5.5 million pounds, and roughly 3.7 MM pounds of that is just fuel (700k liquid, 1.5mm solid in each booster). And a lot of that fuel is required simply to lift the rest of the fuel. If you had an orbiting refuel area the cost of space missions would be dramatically lower, because you could use much smaller/cheaper rockets to get stuff out of earths gravity. Think Falcon 9 vs SLS.