Assembling premade components is one thing, I think he was talking about actually making stuff. If we want effective shielding, that’s a lot of mass, so it would be much easier if we could find it already up there
Maybe if you were going to try to mass produce up there, but the mass of the equipment needed to mine and smelt ore and roll it out into plating would be way more than the mass of the plating for a single vehicle. And that’s not considering capturing an asteroid and bringing it into orbit.
Assembling premade components is one thing, I think he was talking about actually making stuff. If we want effective shielding, that’s a lot of mass, so it would be much easier if we could find it already up there
Maybe if you were going to try to mass produce up there, but the mass of the equipment needed to mine and smelt ore and roll it out into plating would be way more than the mass of the plating for a single vehicle. And that’s not considering capturing an asteroid and bringing it into orbit.