In Kim Stanley Robinson's 1992 novel Red Mars, shortly after the first 100 colonists land on the red planet, they begin building the first permanent human settlement off of the Earth in over a billion years. Among the first pieces of extraterrestrial infrastructure is a propellant generation machine supplied by General Electric.

As we enter the Second Space Age, science fiction stories like this are serving as a template for our reality. With access to orbit now commoditized, we can begin building real orbital infrastructure.