your Mars vehicle on the Moon.makes a certain amount of the problem of boosting those same The advantage to the moon is assembly of parts can be done their under the effects of gravity. Assembling large projects from parts might sound easier in micro-gravity, but maneuvering becomes such a pain it's a lot easier for humans to work under gravitational effects (it's how we evolved to operate). It also has signs of ice for water, so you could potentially use it as a cheap source for that, and may well have other viable minerals usable in space exploration. We are a far way from mining the Moon for Earth use. Unless we find some extremely rare mineral there (like Platinum), most stuff we need is vastly easier to find on Earth. No, mining and manufacturing on the Moon would be as a staging ground for further exploration. Escape velocity there is ~1/3 Earth's, so it's about as easy to transfer from there to deep-space as it would be from LEO anyways. Not to mention it would serve as a nice test of our ability to establish a base on another world without being out of (relatively easy) reach of Earth, and there is a ton of Lunar science to be done on the surface yet. The main problem with Moon is 1. lack of water and 2. you need a lot of energy to do anything on the Moon. 1) There are other things you can do that don't require