Another profitable industry besides mining could be setting up nursing homes on the moon, where wealthy elderly folks could live fuller lives due to the reduced gravity. Yes, the idea of this only being available to the super-rich (at first) is nauseating to me too, but if it provides the source of funding to establish sustainable moon bases, that would be incredible, and other industries could follow afterwards, including e.g. new sports leagues such as low-gravity basketball and soccer.
Eventually, enough people would be living on the moon as helpers for the wealthy folks and athletes that eventually there would be so many working-class people on the moon that secondary and tertiary industries would spring up to provide products and services for the working-class people. Soon enough it would become profitable to farm crops on the moon (for lunar consumption), build products on the moon (for lunar consumption), and more.
We'd eventually get to the point where a lunar nation could have positive GDP and be economically self-sustaining. It would be a trade partner with the terrestrial nations, and be the first new nation to step beyond Earth. Generations of people will get married and be born there, and humanity would be a step closer to settling the cosmos.
That's what makes this all so stupefyingly difficult to even begin to try to predict what will happen. We're not going through the usual window of exclusivity. We're going from [nobody can afford this, except governments - and even then only for toy missions] to ['everybody' can afford this for anything], instantly. So there's no reason that e.g. a nursing home, or anything else, on the Moon would be restricted to the super wealthy, besides demand. Obviously these industries will be being built from the ground up, and demand will likely dramatically outpace supply for the foreseeable future. But that cost imbalance would not be because of fundamental costs.
Also you left out the most fun. Who isn't going to want to go have sex in space? Either with a partner or catching some Moon Poon at a brothel? That's going to be an industry that'll have people coming by the millions, and shouldn't really require that much to get the initial infrastructure erected.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_launch_market_competitio...
Wow, that's insane; as you said, I didn't even realize this leap is this vast! $5 for delivery of a bottle of water is barely more expensive than DoorDash or Postmates on Earth!!
If you launched a Starship with just a single bottle of water it'd become way more than $25,000. Similarly you could make your doordash/postmates bottle of water a lot more expensive if you moved it with a semi-trailer and a team of movers.
I don’t know what laws apply on the Moon, but thanks to ITAR, Starship probably won’t be able to launch from outside the United States, which means any actual moon travel is going to be governed by US and Florida and/or Texas law. Neither of those states have legal prostitution, and while I’m not a legal expert, I suspect knowingly ferrying prostitutes to the moon might be considered a form of human trafficking. They shut down Backpage for less.
A sad few with no remaining attachments to the rest of Earth might benefit from a reduced risk of hip fracture, but that hardly seems like a good economic basis for a Moon base.
That's what SR Hadden did in Contact ;) as always, Carl Sagan is still teaching us to this day