SpaceX and trailing competitors are trying to make it cheap enough to get stuff out of the gravity well (including people and our more advanced products) that more permanent installations other places can get started. Elon says Mars a lot, probably because it's popular with the public. It's still expensive to send things up a gravity well, even if it's less expensive. The moon is shallow by comparison, and the asteroid belt far away but barely a dip. It would be safest to send robots first, bootstrap an installation that can manufacture local propulsion of any sort, O2, water, maybe even refine useful building materials, metal, or other resources. Anything so less is sent up.
Hopefully among all those things would also be materials to make large mirrors (optical and other portions of the EM spectrum), in less gravity, where it's cheaper to move them to useful areas of space, or even just truck them to spots around the surface of the moon.
One word: mining. The moon has literal tons of helium-3 that, if brought back to Earth, would tank the market. yes it's a bit capital intensive too get started but the payoff is huge! Just need to borrow the particle physicists' budget for a second.
"Just need to borrow the particle physicist's budget for a second."
I don't think thats enough and I also don't think the market for Helium-3 is that lucrative, since comercial fusion is for some reasons still not in sight.
Apollo took 9 years and about $25 billion to get there, so we can treat that as an upper limit. However, the Capstop cubesat just reached the moon[0] for $30 million[1] so the roughly $5 Billion for the LHC should be enough to get us to the moon these days. And there's plenty of aluminum and titanium to bring back until commercial fusion arrives.
