This could be interesting

Another geeky post about Space Exploration.  Another in a series of posts on this subject.

Back in August, the New Scientist had a story about brainstorming sessions in which NASA wanted to find ways to use parts of the ISS to visit an asteroid, as opposed to launching the infrastructure from Earth.

On Tuesday, Brian Wilcox of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, presented (pdf) some of the ideas generated by the agency's engineers during brainstorming sessions in January and June. 

NASA hosted a conference on these ideas back in August.  Here's a page from a pdf with a couple of ideas.

 
It shows what you can do with the ISS, but it might be better to do this in lunar orbit
instead.  Then you can use the moon as launch base using ideas like this:

It is a circular track concept which the Air Force was studying back in 2006.  On Earth,
a mass driver would encounter friction from the air, which would cause overheating.
But on the Moon, there is no atmosphere and so there is no friction.  It has the virtue
of not requiring fuel in order to launch.  Also, on the Moon, the velocities needed for
orbit would be much lower.  This means less power needed to get off the surface than
the Earth.  You could mine the Moon for fuel for rockets that could be catapulted into
orbit around the Moon.

From the Moon, you would refuel the rockets for trips to the solar system or back to
Earth or even back to the surface of the moon.  You may want to do this to get crew
back and forth.