Why can't we put a space station on the moon?

It’s fortuitous that the southern craters are loaded with water (ice). Year-round daylight exists above the rim for solar panels and, perhaps for light reflecting mirrors for light and heat. The mirrors, with tracking, could send light to solar panels within the base.

Far greater safety is another benefit within the crater and away from solar flux.
 
Ian Whittaker needs to read up on cloud city-like L-point space colonies and colonization. Gerard K. O'Neill's 'The High Frontier' and/or, better, T. A. Heppenheimer's 'Colonies In Space', among so many other like works on space settlement, space farming, space mining, molding, industrialization, on and on in books and on the web.

The Moon makes the greatest initial mining base for the beginning of near term almost limitless building and expansion in space. A mining base that would then easily help pay the freight of doubling as a science station. The last thing the Moon is good for is a 'way station', a 'staging station', on the way out into the rest of the solar system, galaxy, and universe. Facilities at the L-points will be infinitely better as 'staging ('way') stations' because they will already be in space in addition to being infinitely more flexible as to construction and assembly facilitation. They will be capable of tooling up to large and very large projects, impossible for the surfaces of Earth or the Moon, or even probably wanted in low orbits (still too narrowly limited in dimensional capabilities).
 

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