I hope they concentrate on mining the moon... We should focus on mining the oceans. More minerals and 1000 times easier - and cheaper - to get. Considering the difficulties inherent in space travel - including gravity wells and the lack of any atmosphere - we should really focus on resources that are readily available here.
Let Russia, China, and Japan fight over the moon. We’ll just take the entire Eastern half of the Pacific...
True enough.
But if you want to fabricate big, really big structures in space, you have to fabricate them off of the Earth’s surface. The Moon has titanium and unfiltered sunlight, two prime resources for microdeposition manufacturing. (Think of it as 3d lithography with a microwelding torch.)
Send the manufacturing machines to the Moon, combine them with freely available energy and raw materials to manufacture the parts. Cuts down tremendously from what you would have to haul up from Earth’s gravity well.