This continues to befuddle me. So let's assume Musk nails it and can do this for $10M. Instead of my 20, imagine 200 100-ton landings of cargo on the moon, say

This continues to befuddle me. So let's assume Musk nails it and can do this for $10M. Instead of my 20, imagine 200 100-ton landings of cargo on the moon, say over the period of ten years. Instead of everybody sitting on Earth, trying to design-session-out the perfect lunar base, why not just keep regularly-delivering supplies, then learn how to build a lunar base while on the moon, figuring it out as you go? After all, just like SpaceX, we're not trying to build a lunar base. We're trying to build a factory for constructing lunar bases, eventually hundreds of them. Solving the modular/generic problem is what we want to do, not build another Space Shuttle. Perhaps I'm wrong, but it seems like most of the people here, indeed most of the aerospace industry, naturally prefer these big, lumbering, paperwork-heavy, long-lasting bureaucratic programs. But without enough regularly-arriving supplies, why try to solve something up-front, all-at-once, and perhaps years or decades ahead of time when you can just figure out the bare minimum of things you need just as you need them? But like I said, I'm probably missing something. I've been saying for 20+ years that our real problem is cost-to-LEO. Now that we're just barely beginning to address that, the next problem very well may likely be changing the way we think of large space-based programs. That could very well end up being a bigger problem than cost over the long run. ADD: Seems to me that the Starship is a solution to delivering humans to space. We need reusable heat shields, booster packs, and payload capsules, along with an Earth-based mass-driver, to truly drive down cargo rates another 100x. At that point we'll begin seriously talking about becoming a space-faring species.