[BonsaiDen]

Factories in Orbit, pretty much. There might not be many products today which will benefit from this ability, but a free fall environment brings many benefits to things such as crystallization of materials.

For example, the last resupply mission of Space X to the ISS included an experiment to product optical fibers onboard the space station, the goal is that these fibers will have a much lower number of defects in their crystalline structure then their earth produced counterparts, this means less refraction, which results in less signal loss over a longer distance which reduces the number of repeaters which reduces increases the overall signal speed.

Now, of course if you wanted to deploy these things on a world wide scale you'll need to set up a bigger shop then the ISS - which most likely will go out of service within the next decade anyway...

And while the moon does not provide a free fall environment such as LEO, the gravitational influence is still much lower than on earth itself and scaling up on a surface will most likely prove easier in the long term than doing so in orbit around the earth.

[adrianN]

Getting to Moon orbit from the Moon is also much easier that getting in LEO.