Archive: https://archive.today/Q0LDP From the post: >>Everything that rides a rocket has to earn its seat, because lifting mass off the ground is still priced by the pound and the bill is brutal. A water tank, a bag of bolts and a solar panel all ride up at the same eye-watering rate, which is why engineers burn careers shaving grams off hardware that then has to survive a launch and work in a vacuum. Blue Origin’s answer to that arithmetic is to stop shipping one of the heaviest things a Moon base needs and grow it on site instead. The company wants to make solar panels out of the dust already lying on the lunar surface, with nothing in the cargo hold: no panels, no glass, no wire. Dirt goes into a reactor, finished solar cells come out the far end.