Thanks for that thoughtful answer! I have seen discussions of the energy to go around the solar system (starting with the tremendous energy it takes to get to l

Thanks for that thoughtful answer! I have seen discussions of the energy to go around the solar system (starting with the tremendous energy it takes to get to leo vs go from there to anywhere else) but never heard that Mercury had an advantage. So the idea apparently is instead of trying to lift things to leo, we build it on mercury and it doesn't have our gravity well - that other notion of the orbital velocity of mercury giving things a good starting push is another cool thing to investigate. I had another vision, informed from science fiction. It was that we could send relatively small machines (self replicating using local materials on the asteroid) and they could do everything we want after we figure out the replicating w local materials part. And because we only need to send a small starter robot it doesn't use that much energy. What do you think of that? I mean we could do the same with materials to process them on Mercury.