[RightWhale]

not provide unlimited resources forever

The space program sucked me in in the 50s and then proceeded to dither and delay throughout my entire working lifetime, so moon development is something I may read about from my bed at the retirement home but won't participate in.

But, it might be interesting to work on the problem of providing unlimited resources forever to the moon. How would this be done? Crashing watery comets and carbonaceous chondrite asteroids into the moon seems like a fine way to get started.

[Cincinatus]

There are plenty of solar wind implanted volatiles on the dust grains of the lunar soil, so theoretically, you could mine those forever.

We go to the poles first because stuff there is concentrated and easy to use. Later, as we establish a foothold, we expand to use increasingly "lower grade" ores, exactly what we do in terrestrial mining.