that's fair, I was kinda just inferring as someone whose space travel experience is limited to Kerbal Space Program. The point still stands though: whether it's atmo or gravity the moon has a lot less of it than the earth, but still has a lot more local resources and space to put things semi-permanently. Long distance slower than light space travel has a Sahara problem and at least in the solar system the same sol'n could be used: leapfrogging from cache to cache. The ISS is a better cache than the nothing that was there before it, but a functioning moon base would be an amazing cache from which to launch ops into the deep solar system.