The surface of the Earth is an economically hard market for space mining; sure there is demand there, but there is already the most competitive supply in the solar system. It's no so clear that precious metals would be precious if you got more of them, see the short story that is titled the same as this book. [1]

I have notebooks but no publications on an analysis of the problem of setting up a factory on a carbonaceous chondrite asteroid that would make large plastic and aluminum solar sails that would fly back on their own power to the Earth-Sun L1 point to block sunlight and mitigate climate change. I pointed to this [2] as an example of the kind of construction, but it was pointed out to me that IKAROS didn't survive that long. Something interesting about the sunshade concept though is that a high performance sunshade is actually heavier and less reflective than the ideal solar sail because a heavier and darker sail sits in a more favorable geometry to block sunlight. Maybe more material could mean more durable. I had a very clear mental picture of how to make PET plastic but not so much the Kapton which used to make space blankets and stuff. Drexler and O'Neills other students envisioned using vapor-phase techniques to make big structures in space, but didn't address the manufacturing of biaxially stretched plastics like Mylar and Kapton that are likely solar sail materials. You probably have some machine that makes long strips of plastic that get welded or otherwise stuck together by robots, I have some idea of what that large scale 'assembler' looks like.

I was taking a class in geoengineering and was struck about how the problem involved technologies related to clean energy and carbon capture, for instance asteroids probably contain something which could best be described as "coal" and an obvious path to turning them into what we think of as "petrochemicals" would go through a machine like [3]. You get waste CO2 from the chemistry which you're going to recycle because it's precious [4]. One problem I was worried about was that an asteroid like that probably contains a lot of trapped gas which you'd want to remove before you do anything else because you don't want to waste it and it might even be dangerous. You probably send a factory which builds a factory and you will sure need storage tanks, there will be enough iron to make similar tanks to the ones we use on Earth, but the storage tank factory won't be online before you need to degas.

You could ship spools of tape with microcontrollers stuck on them and other complex objects from Earth but if you really want flexibility you want something that can fabricate small arbitrary complex objects, which is what led Drexler to his "assembler" idea which unfortunately hasn't materialized. There's a tough decision between: do you send people (who need a habitat and might not come back) who can fix things that break and deal with exceptional events or do you build a replica factory in cislunar space where a crew can do experiments and handle exceptional events by remote control (with a 40 min delay sometimes) or can you build a really autonomous controller?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Element_79_(anthology)

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IKAROS

[3] https://www.dakotagas.com/

[4] though Martians are likely to vent waste CO2 to the same atmosphere they use as a CO2 source