I've always thought we as a civilization were jumping the gun with our focus on getting to Mars. Shouldn't we be focused on expanding industry into LEO and to

I've always thought we as a civilization were jumping the gun with our focus on getting to Mars. Shouldn't we be focused on expanding industry into LEO and to the surface of the moon? We have no mining capability and no capacity to gather resources off-Earth with the intent to build anything with them. We can't even make fuel that I know of. We haven't even increased our LEO population beyond the ISS and Tiangong, with the capacity of at most a dozen people living in space at any one time. If we want to get off this rock in a permanent way we need the ability to build ships and habitats in space, using materials sourced in space, outside of Earth's gravity well. I wish our space-centric billionaires were focusing on that instead of Mars, because there is a lot of work we'll need to do to make that happen. It's just not as sexy, I guess. Generally speaking I think we should be focusing on iterating space habitats, ultimately working towards O'Neill cylinders.