Adderbox76 , 28 days ago

I don’t tend to look at the moon for mining itself, more as the port from which we can more cheaply and easily head to the asteroid belt where the money is.

Launching stuff off of earth in order to build large structures/ships in orbit is expensive as hell because of the gravity well. Get moon manufacturing off the ground, then everything we build and everywhere we go from there becomes infinitely cheaper (including Mars).

The Moon gives us the solar system. Far more than going direct to Mars ever would.