Yes, to really make this work you’d have to have an industrial city on the Moon.
There are two factors to consider. One is the energy requirements of getting materials to where you want the materials to be be. The other is the requirement for turning raw materials into the finished products that you need. The first is a lot easier on the moon and much harder on the earth, while the second is easier on the earth and much much much harder on the moon.
What people don’t realize is that our industrial civilization requires the specialized inputs of hundreds of millions of people producing an enormous panoply of industrial goods. This specialization and mass production is what makes it possible to buys a box of 144 pencils delivered to your door in three days for $9.77. If you had to manufacture pencils on the moon, each pencil would cost tens of thousands or maybe even millions of dollars, once you factored in the labor and capital costs.
But of course, you wouldn’t do that to manufacture one pencil. You’d only set up a production line for pencils if you needed thousands and thousands of them.
The point is, the science fictional trope of a small isolated village outpost on some distant planet that nevertheless has a modern industrial economy is a complete fantasy. Yeah, if we had Star Trek style replicators where everything you need can come out of a magic box in your living room for free, then you can do whatever you want. That’s not going to happen any time soon.
Seems roughly analogous to asking “If Toyota wishes to sell cars in South America, is it more practical to ship them from Japan, or to build a manufacturing plant in the Falkland Islands?”
To be correct, more like a"build an assembly plant in the Falkland Islands."
I mean, if the Falklands already had the industrial infrastructure to build a majority of the components, an assembly plant might make sense. But if they’re just shipping parts vs. finished vehicles, it makes no sense at all.
A space elevator isn’t an “orbital tower”, it is a cable dangling down from Geosynchronous orbit. And only the top of the tower is “in orbit.” The section of the elevator at the elevation GEO is circling the Earth once every 24 hours, which matches GEO orbital velocity. Step outside of the elevator, and you are in orbit. The section of the elevator at the elevation of LEO is circling the Earth once every 24 hours, which is around 18 times slower than LEO orbital velocity. Step outside the elevator, and you fall 100 or so miles to your death.
So to build something at the elevation of LEO with the assistance of a space elevator, there would either have to be a manufacturing platform permanently attached to the elevator at that point (adding lots of mass) or you would have to use rockets to accelerate all of your equipment and materials to the proper velocity for LEO.
Correction: the elevator’s center of mass is at or ‘around’ Geosync orbit, so some of it is higher, practically much higher, this offsets the weight of the cable.
Right, except you’ve to to have magic cable that doesn’t break from all this weight you’re expecting it to handle.
It’s like building a cable out of wet noodles. A wet noodle will hold together, but at some point you get a long enough wet noodle and it breaks just from dangling it over the floor. The weight of the wet noodle itself is greater than what the wet noodle can handle.
And at the forces and scales of a space elevator, every real-world material currently available is the equivalent of overcooked pasta.