Part 6 of lunar station

Part 5 here.

This all started with the idea of making a lunar station that could lift itself off the ground.

Well, that may get diverted a bit with this post.  Or perhaps not.

A problem to solve is how to make fuel to get back and forth between the asteroid and the lunar surface?

The advantage to this is save money.  It costs a lot of money to use disposable rockets.  You want to use them over and over again.  Secondly, you don't want to transport fuel from Earth.  It costs 25,000 dollars a pound to put something on the lunar surface.

NASA wants to bring an asteroid to the moon and have a mission there someday.  Okay.  So, when you get there, what do you do?

If the asteroid is typical, it will be carbonaceous with a good deal of water content.  With that, you can make fuel, but not enough to get to Mars.

So, what do you do with that capability?

It turns out that you can "burn" elemental carbon with carbon dioxide provided that you have plenty of energy.  One thing you may consider doing is bringing solar panels from the moon to where the asteroid is.  You can use the ever increasing capability of the solar power panels that you obtain with each trip down in order to make more and more fuel.  Do the same thing on the surface.

Here's the way it would look:

1. Make enough fuel to make a trip down to a water source.
2. Obtain the water.  Make fuel on the surface to use to go back up.
3. On the way up, bring back some completed solar panels and repeat.
4. Once you completed processing the asteroid, you will have a big fuel production facility on the surface and where the asteroid was.
5. Get another asteroid, and repeat as often as desired.
6. Repeated often enough, and you'll have enough to go to Mars.  Or you could send the orbital facility on to Mars and build a new one at the moon.
7. You may even take the solar panels with you to Mars with your crew.  You will make your own fuel for your trip down.  
8. Perhaps you could lift off the lunar surface the production facility on the surface and transport it to Mars.

Think it would work?