[gryphonclaw]

I think it's more escaping the gravity well, as the energy consumed by air resistance is fairly negligible compared to gravity and is more of a stability issue. But yeah, once in LEO you're halfway to anywhere as long as you can bring enough mass up for what you need.

[m4rtink]

Yeah, the atmosphere complicates things a bit during launch but much bigger issue is gravity - Earth having the highest gravity in the Solar System among solid surface bodies.

For landing hovever it makes things signifficantly easier! You can break full arrival speed from lunar or interplanetary space (successfully done by Apollo missions) with a relatively light passive heatshield & land on parachutes. You can even brek to orbit instead or use the atmosphere to change incliunation of your orbit and other tricks (there are proposals for air breathing ion engines, etc.).

Lack of sufficient atmosphere is what makes landing on Mercury (no atmosphere, need to break to zero using rcoket thrust) and Mars (enough atmosphere to break from arrival speed, not enough to use parashutes or gliders for a soft landing) so difficult .

[ratelimitsteve]

that's fair, I was kinda just inferring as someone whose space travel experience is limited to Kerbal Space Program. The point still stands though: whether it's atmo or gravity the moon has a lot less of it than the earth, but still has a lot more local resources and space to put things semi-permanently. Long distance slower than light space travel has a Sahara problem and at least in the solar system the same sol'n could be used: leapfrogging from cache to cache. The ISS is a better cache than the nothing that was there before it, but a functioning moon base would be an amazing cache from which to launch ops into the deep solar system.

[Armisael16]

If you’ve played KSP you should know how totally useless Mun bases are.