>>12592012Scaling back a bit and thinking about how to do it more economically with lower initial investment I see a couple approaches. Exploitation of NEOs is pivotal though due to lower deltaV requirements to reach them.
1. Send up a moderate orbital manufacturing facility (e.g. something like a souped up Wake Shield Facility for substrate printing among others for proteins, crystals etc.)
2. Use profits from this to send up asteroid mining rig and basic refinement facility
3) The refinement station specialises in elements like silicon and other semiconductors - whatever elements are being used the most in your low volume manufacturing. It stays in LEO or L5 and the mining rig delivers asteroid material to it - you refine these materials and feed them into your orbital manufactories - you are thus weaning yourself off earth shipments and increasing your profitz.
4) Using these profits you send up more mining rigs and refining facilities specialising in other elements such as those useful for structural elements e.g. iron, nickel, titanium. Along these you ship very basic manufacturing facilities that can construct heavy structural and power elements (think trusses, tanks and solar panels)
5) With your new rigs you start delivering higher volumes of material that are refined and constructed into the skeletons of more mining rigs and processing facilities
6) Leverage this by now only shipping up the more complicated functional parts of your infrastructure (think control processors, servos, robotics etc.) Thus you get more facilities and ships per shipment
7) Repeat ad nauseum until you have facilities to refine most elements in the periodic table and a full fleet of mining rigs regularly bringing in material
8) Then start aiming for belt asteroids ramp up resource harvesting and processing capabilities by orders of magnitude
9) Go engage in groovy space construction projects, giant interferometers, space habitats, space ships whatever you like.
