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IIRC, Rocket Lab is also contracted to carry MoonEx's Google Lunar X-Prize (GLXP) mission later this year. All the more reason to wish them well on these upcoming flights.

There have been attempts to smelt metals in space, and in fact such efforts may even be beneficial for terrestrial applications. So successful that it may even be possible to suggest an economic role for shipping ores and elemental feed stocks from the Earth into orbit, perform the smelting and manufacturing in space, and then shipping finished products back to the Earth again for use here.

That you might be able to extract those elements in space even cheaper than you can ship them up from the surface of the Earth seems to be icing on the cake. Certainly whole new classes of materials are likely going to be created in space simply because a major factor that influences all manufacturing process here on the Earth will be removed.

As far as finding materials and devices that can work in space, of course it is something that takes time to discover and to work out all of the issues. It should be pointed out that we as a species has been working and doing stuff in space for more than 50 years, and that materials as well as equipment to be working in space has been developed. This isn't even really new technology in a great many cases.

The largest problem seems to be simply somebody having the will to go up and bother trying. Luckily there are several different companies who are willing to put up or shut up on the prospect as well. They are putting their money where their mouth is at and really try. I would even dare to suggest that other companies are going to show up eventually with this emerging industrial sector.

The largest problem they are facing right now is that these places in space are on the frontier of human endeavors. This means they are still trying to design the tools which make the tools producing the tools needed for those environments. Those working toward developing the resources in space still need to design the things that are the equivalent of the machine screw, lathe, and drill press that are so necessary for making so many other kinds of tools and being able to harvest resources in an extra-terrestrial setting.

Still, I agree with your basic premise that the best way to open up the Solar System and get humanity out there is to simply turn people loose and to let them try thousands or even millions of different ideas and let the successful ideas come forward as well as forget the millions of mistakes that didn't work. Trying to force everything through some sort of committee who is going to make a grand plan for how everything will work and get clearance before even acting is real silly.

Then again, for some time I've suggested that CNN will cover NASA astronauts landing on Mars for the first time by having one of their reporters on site filming the landing and interviewing the astronauts when they arrive.

Somebody else is already doing that.