The argument of this article appears to be that we are developing so many useful devices that would also work on the moon, we no longer have to invent a huge amount of infrastructure from scratch – which makes sense, and applies in many domains.

One advantage of being a technological society is that you have all of these pre-solved problems just waiting for the solution to be applied elsewhere.

http://futurism.com/colonize-moon-2022and-cost-less-aircraft-carrier/