Going to the moon to get water and bring it back to earth orbit is going to be much more expensive than sending water from earth for a long time.

The image of the really big mass driver that looks like a train you get from O’Neill or Heinlein is obsolete.

The US Navy built a 2.5km/s railgun you could fit on a ship. A 3.5 km/s coilgun has to look like the Paris gun to be practical and be able to shoot at a high elevation to hit Earth-Moon L1/L2 or near-Earth space. A railroad car worth of material per day in 1kg or so increments seems plausible. A radiation shield for a deep space station or a simulated asteroid to test mining and manufacturing technology might compete with terrestrial materials.

O’Neill’s students never came up with believable catcher and I’ve yet to see one I like. I guess you could get to LEO if you could aerobrake but it looks tough because the outer atmosphere is always changing and a wild shot could trash your target, talk about a space junk problem.

The moon has at best a large glacier on it and my guess is Lunarians, if they could vote, would not want to export a gram of it but rather incorporate it into a circular economy.

you just let fleet of Boeing 702 go fetch couples of comets and asteroids into L4/L5, build Manhattan sized pressure cookers around each piles, allow contents to come to boil on solar heat, and boom, pressurized habitats