From a paper about self-replicating high-tech hardware, or “Affordable Bootstrapping,” which could be employed in outer space to dramatically reduce the cost of interstellar nation-building, a segment about the first several decades of this potential operation:

“The first hardware sent to the Moon will be high-tech equipment built on Earth. However, the high launch costs demand that it be mass-limited so it will have insufficient manufacturing capability to replicate itself. It will construct a set of crude hardware made out of poor materials, so the second generation is actually more primitive and inefficient than the first. The goal from that point is to initiate a spiral of technological advancement until the Moon achieves its own mature capabilities like Earth’s. This evolving approach will provide several benefits. First, industry on the Moon can develop differently than on Earth. The environment, the manufacturing materials, the operators (robots versus humans), and the products and target markets are all different. Allowing it some reasonable time to develop will allow it to evolve an appropriate set of technologies and methods that naturally fit these differences. Second, the evolving approach supports the development of automation so that industry can then spread far beyond the Moon. The technological spiral will develop the robotic ‘workers’ in parallel with the factories. It will also improve automated manufacturing techniques such as 3D printing. The third and probably most important benefit is the economic one. As we show here, a space economy can grow very rapidly, and it will quickly require massive amounts of electronics and robotics unless there is full closure. The tiny computer chips alone become too expensive to launch within a few decades as the industry grows exponentially, and therefore we will quickly need lithography machines on the Moon to make the computer chips. The evolving approach sends only a small and primitive set of machines as ‘colonists,’ and the nascent lunar industry develops over time – but still rapidly – toward the full sophistication that Earth cannot afford to launch. This may seem too far reaching to a reader first exposed to the idea, but the key is the on-going rapid advancement in robotics. After robotic dexterity, machine vision, and autonomy improve for another couple of decades, robots will build lithography machines on the Moon as easily as human workers build them on Earth. This future is not far away, considering the exponential rate of technology development in terrestrial industries. Robotics experts are optimistic that the necessary levels of automation will be developed quickly enough to support the timeline we present here (Moravec, 2003).

So the objective is for the first robotic ‘colonists’ on the Moon to fabricate a set of, say, 1700’s-era machines and then to advance them steadily through the equivalent of the 1800’s, 1900’s, and finally back into the 2000’s. We argue that this can be accomplished in just a few decades.” (Thanks Next Big Future.)