>>143022264.) heavy equipment that works on Mars, the moon, etc. I imagine a branch of a big heavy equipment/engineering company like caterpillar, Volvo, liebherr, etc could do a skunkworks project, or a startup could do agile development of this. Basically, just modify heavy equipment to handle the weirdness of other heavenly bodies: vacuum, several hundred degree temperature swings, staticky charged dust, very sharp dust, percolates and other toxic shit, very long latency to earth (for remote operations), etc. if the option to buy a rover/crane/excavator/bulldozer/etc. existed, anyone going to Mars or the moon would probably buy it instead of building their own. I imagine the first starship on the moon or Mars might need to do a rough landing to unload some heavy equipment which would then make a proper landing pad/infrastructure for subsequent rockets. Once the pad is built, the heavy equipment could start building a mine or roads. Once other starships land, the junk cargo can be unloaded and assembled with this gear. Also, science payloads could be gathered by this equipment then reloaded into empty starships for their trip home.
