Just Post

You’re underestimating the difficulty.

Getting to space is indescribably hard.

Maintaining a manned base in an ocean trench or an open lava pit or under sea ice would be cheaper.

The only rationale is science (which is very important), but Van Braun couldn’t really envision today's computerized drones and comms networks. As an example, the opposite side of the moon would be an excellent spot for certain types of space telescopes.

There are some speculative sci fi industries, like helium-3 mining, asteroid mining, space solar, or solar shades to reduce global warming, but nothing that’s even in the universe of cost effective now.