Cornwall and Wales are proposing their second joint colonisation effort: low-Earth space. The proposal is to build factories up there. In microgravity and no oxygen contamination, much work can be done cheaper than down here.
The reason nobody thought of doing this before is that, er, first you have to get all this material up there, and then gently glide the finished product down to where you want it. This was not possible before the Falcon 9 era.
Of course doing dangerous chemistry in space by robots is also a lot "greener" than doing it down here next to winds and rivers. I submit this consideration to all our Walter Pecks whilst they're bogging the Starship. Or at least for American voters to consider.
Some people care about the "carbon footprint". Chemical launches burn carbon. This might be cancelled by the carbon footprint of forcing vacuum-conditions upon factory production on Earth. I'd not even be surprised if the orbital factories can just ship the product to the continent which submitted the request, cutting down on all that cargo-freight.
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