It seems to make much more sense to me to completely automate the production of solar cells, and to, as you say, do that in space. If we boost the technology to the moon in the first instance, and once it has replicated to a big enough size, use the energy to accelerate earth mass back into earth orbit, where we manufacture it into what we need.

I have been championing this idea at http://www.solnx.org for over two decades now.

Now that we have practical technologies like google’s self driving car it is becoming much easier for many more people to see what seemed obvious to me almost 30 years ago.
We’re getting there.

The biggest impediment to such progress towards radical abundance is in fact the concepts of money and markets.

Markets are great tools for allocating scarce resources, but cannot deal with abundance, and most certainly are not incentivised to produce abundance. Markets require, and thrive upon, scarcity (most profit is made when perceived scarcity is far greater than actual scarcity).

Thus we can expect markets, and market based entities (corporations, and increasingly governments) to be strongly opposed to any mechanism that delivers radical abundance.

This is a non-trivial problem.

Disinventing the concept of money is not going to be easy, and it does seem to me to be required for the long term survival of humanity.