Well there is the prospect of mining, refining, and construction in space and on the moon. While all that presents a whole slew of new challenges, it also has m

Well there is the prospect of mining, refining, and construction in space and on the moon. While all that presents a whole slew of new challenges, it also has many huge benefits. Rockets use like 90% of their fuel just getting their payload into off of Earth, refining fuels on the moon would make going any place else in the solar system super cheap. Building ships already in space would allow much lighter designs and less constricted spaces as it doesn't have to survive an external atmosphere and intense winds. It also makes asteroid capturing and mining feasible, currently we would need an almost perfectly ideal asteroid to capture because we can't get that much fuel up into space to push an asteroid around much at all. We open up tons of potential candidates if we can make even small amounts of fuel off of Earth. Capture even a small platinum asteroid and nudge it into a collision course with Antarctica and you just made platinum stupid cheap which has a bazillion amazing uses but currently costs ridiculous amounts of money. It would be worth more than the entirety of all space programs on Earth combined, just to do it once.