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The central advantage of such facilities is that it will be much much cheaper to launch material into space from the moon...

Unless you're making things out of stuff that's already on the moon you'd have to get the raw material from Earth to the Moon, and then from the Moon to where you want it in space. There might well be advantages to doing that, raw materials can be fired in to space at higher Gs than manufactured parts using a railgun for example, but the cost of building a Moon factory is likely to mean the cost of building on the Moon is still much higher for a long time.



The point is explicitly to use materials from the moon.


Those materials aren’t on the moon.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_resources

Seems to have plenty of iron and titanium and aluminum, but we have spent almost no time there so we don't really know. Well when I say 'we' haven't spent much time there I don't mean to speak for you. You may in fact have been born there for all I know. But the rest of us need to do more research I think before reaching any such conclusion. Or maybe we could just ask you.


Ok, tell me how many millions of tons of equipment and how many gigawatts of power we will need to process out large quantities of these resources from razor sharp sand, and how many trillions of dollars it will cost to build it on the moon?

We can process gold out of seawater, so why do we dig far into the earth to find veins of gold?


The lunar surface seems rich in silicon, iron, magnesium and aluminium, great materials to build spaceships from.


Only with the investment of massive amounts of energy and landing millions of tons of equipment to process regolith and melt out important components. The same materials can be found in near earth asteroids without that massive investment, or being buried in such a large gravity well.

It’s like saying we can process good out of seawater, which we can, but it’s hand waving away the massive difficulties.




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