And again to the extent the assembler stuff is feasible you have to look at who's doing it. Well the 3D printing in space demos took place on the ISS, with the first being a NASA-incubated, SBIR-funded startup and the second being an ESA initiative involving iconic oldspace company Airbus and some academics. It's certainly not as profitable as owning most of the world's launch capacity and not coincidentally most of the world's satellites, but the people that are doing the low level, high risk stuff are coming out of research institutes and living off agency funding....

By way of analogy, radio is a mature market. Maybe a little more than mature, to be honest, it’s well past its prime. In the early days of radios, you know who ran the radio stations? The companies that made radios! Because who’s going to buy a radio without a radio station to listen to? It took years for people to figure out the radio advertising business model but RCA wasn’t willing to wait that long so they just operated a bunch of radio stations as a cost center to encourage people to buy more radios. But then the market matured and the roles of “broadcasting” and “manufacturing home radios” diverged into different companies.

Floatation is handled by pair of upoer and lower passive guide coils on the wall, just induction current can keep vehicles vertically centered. Propulsion is handled by constant alternating current on alternatingly pointed coils. Speed can be modulated between zero to max by merely modulating strength, not frequency or phase, of vehicle side magnets.

It does need a lot of materials to build one with 3.5km/s max speed on the Moon, though, so a robotic Lunar foundry might have to be built first.

But once that goes up... space megaprojects will be free, and launches from planetary surfaces will mainly be used for humans or valuable items.

This book has many illustrations of alternate designs considered before the Space Shuttle was finalized

https://www.amazon.com/Shuttle-History-Developing-National-T...

as well as the results of late 1980s-early 1990s studies that considered the possibility of putting together Space Shuttle parts in different ways. Say you could have a bigger external tank, four solid rocket boosters instead of two, and a big-ass orbiter which has five engines instead of three. (That one probably is too much of a boondoggle because they'd have to spend a few billion dollars making a bigger launchpad!)

You might think that, with the research done to develop the parts, it would be cost effective to build something new from Space Shuttle parts but in those studies it was always outrageously expensive to build anything out of Space Shuttle parts because... Space Shuttle parts are stupendously expensive.

In an alternate universe something like the SLS (a non-reusable big-ass booster with lots of stages) could be a lot cheaper than the SLS if it was cost-optimized, but cost-optimization itself isn't cheap!

By contrast to that, the Starship model isn't proven either. Reusable Starship to LEO could be a good business, but orbital refueling is still unsolved and even if it is perfected, current plans are to launch 12-20 Starships to land and return maybe 3 tons from the moon. Think of what a huge thing you could build in LEO if you had 20 Starships!

And so they keep doing the busywork you mentioned, hibernation mode operation at minimum costs. It's still a lot of money on Earth but I suppose not so much in space.

https://nationalpost.com/opinion/high-immigration-is-worseni...

I don't think tax cuts for the rich are very wise given the budget deficit, but continuously increasing government spending, taxes and regulation is not wise either. U.S. government spending as a percentage of GDP is the highest it's ever been, even more than during WW2. Over regulation is a major problem, as seen with CAHSR, and even figures on the left are starting to realize it, e.g. Ezra Klein.

If we can't build, say, a 10K-person inhabited city on the south pole, how can we even imagine we can build it on the moon or Mars?

Just off the top of my head:

- different ability to re-stock

You could re-stock your submersible just about anywhere. You're going to have to do a lot more planning for your groceries when you go in space though.

- access to microgravity

This simply isn't available in a submersible. Microgravity provides some interesting manufacturing and biological capabilities.

- completely different pressure profiles

Combining different pressure environments in microgravity is particularly interesting to me.

- different instrumentation capabilities

It's not just the view -- the atmosphere plays merry hell with instruments when measuring the cosmos. And it does so in ways that just aren't relevant to underwater environments.

Can you list which risks you believe are mitigated by space travel?

Absolutely. NASA's focus on one-off probes is the most ineffective and inefficient way possible.

We now have cheap launch capability, and once a probe is designed multiple copies can be made cheaply.

Just think if we launched 10 JWST telescopes instead of just 1.

Are you insinuating that I was being disingenuous by using them? The ellipsis simply removed a part of the sentence that was irrelevant to the point, but doesn't actually change what you said. You said nothing is happening to their work, and then immediately pointed out work that's going away. Not that complicated.

/shrug