"Space stuff is expensive because launching ships from the bottom of earth's gravity well is expensive." So Don't Do That Then. In fact, doing practically ANY

"Space stuff is expensive because launching ships from the bottom of earth's gravity well is expensive." So Don't Do That Then. In fact, doing practically ANYTHING directly in space is cheaper and easier than trying to launch it out of earths gravity well. Even just mining and refining fuel from the moon and using that to refuel ships in Low Earth Orbit (which is just about attainable with current technology) would be a big help. Yes, mining fuel on the moon is comparatively cheaper than launching it from earth. Here's the thing. Having to launch from earth is so ingrained that someone will likely answer: "but mining fuel on the moon is so expensive!" because they unconsciously add the cost of launching from earth. Don't launch from earth. Sure, maybe you need to do a few launches from earth to get your moon-mining operation going. That's a pretty steep initial investment, I'll grant that too. But after that you are getting fuel from the moon, and that machinery will never need to go back to earth again. You can just keep going from the moon to LEO and back. This saves you from a lot of launches from earth already. Maybe you're thinking that the fuel cost of flying all the way to the moon and back would still be very expensive. You'd be (relatively) wrong. Nothing is as expensive as launching from Earth's surface to LEO. Don't launch from Earth's surface to LEO, and suddenly a lot of things become viable.