>>10946219Sure, but even in the most optimistic timeline you can imagine, we're a long way off from large orbital habitats. Those will be developed in step with eventual asteroid mining efforts, to give people a place to live in comfortable G and with overhead room while they're away from Earth, Moon and Mars for years at a time. The first ones will be relatively small compared to the most common designs we see drawn up today, but they'll give us the experience to build bigger and more complicated later on.
Orbital habitat technology is also what it's going to take to get us out to the outer solar system, because ti makes travel time pretty much a moot point as well as getting around all the issues associated with only having low gravity moons to work with. Once we get fusion power and propulsion, we can use that in step with orbital habitats to colonize any other star system in the galaxy.
So yeah, at some point making huge amounts of building materials on the Moon will make sense, but it won't be for a while, and it'll never make sense to use materials made on the Moon down here on Earth. Our best development path goes Moon and Mars, then asteroids, then orbital habitats everywhere, then interstellar. There will be some overlap and some steps are waaaay bigger than others (colonizing the Moon is like adding another continent's worth of living space and resources to what we already have, colonizing the asteroid belt alone with orbital habitats could easily eclipse the entire combined Earth-Moon-Mars carrying capacity populations combined), but I'm just making a general overview of the most effective way to get space-faring.
As a side note Venus colonization doesn't help us unlock anything else in the solar system and is really hard from any approach due to the delta V required for two-way transport plus the resource desert that is that environment people consider putting floating cities in. It either comes later or gets disassembled at some point.
