It has been suggested that if humanity truly wants to embark on a renewed era of space exploration, one of the key ingredients is the ability to manufacture structures in space. By assembling everything from satellites to spacecraft in orbit, we would eliminate the most costly aspect of going to space. This, simply put, is the sheer expense of escaping Earth’s gravity well, which requires heavy launch vehicles and a lot of fuel.
Source:
https://phys.org/news/2020-02-spider-mission-antenna-space.html