The thing is that the first tens of thousands of "self-reproducing robots" do not have to be entirely self-reproducing. If you can produce 99% of a robot's mas

The thing is that the first tens of thousands of "self-reproducing robots" do not have to be entirely self-reproducing. If you can produce 99% of a robot's mass from materials available in space (on the moon or some asteroid), with 1% of the mass consisting of the most complex ingredients provided by Earth (such as the chips you mentioned), you can effectively launch 100x the number of robots from earth at the same cost. Once you have a couple of thousand relatively flexible robots, you can start to get serious about building specialized labs producing more complex ingredients in space, and then scale up from there. Even then the task is ridiculously complex, and it seems unlikely that the economics of it would work either[1], but it can nevertheless be much simpler than you make it sound. In any case, we should try to get there because any significant step towards this goal will also make life on earth more robust. [1] E.g. in the example of chips, good luck getting the masks for advanced designs, let alone all the implicit know-how that goes into a modern fab.