It wouldn't be as sexy as sending astronauts up, but I think we could get a lot of bang for the buck sending up generic robots and some scientific equipment tha

It wouldn't be as sexy as sending astronauts up, but I think we could get a lot of bang for the buck sending up generic robots and some scientific equipment that could also be used to boot-strap a local production environment for some resources. (solar oven/etc) I imagine it would be useful to gather core samples from a variety of locations and catalog the location of resources. I wonder how much of that could be done with higher intensity radar aimed at the surface while in orbit...