.. and are questionable boot strapping projects.
The biggest cost and therefore barrier to Space exploration is launch costs. These needs to be side stepped.
Launch a design prize for low cost probes to be sent in their dozens, hundreds or perhaps even
thousands to the asteroid belt on low energy transfer trajectories. These need to include cheap & reliable ways to analyse the asteroids for useful materials.
Have a second round to design low cost extraction 'bots' to follow up the analysis probes to 'mine' those materials. These could hoard the supplies or even again use low energy transfer to Earth/Lunar Lagrangian points.
Sell futures to fund the next step based on the value of those materials.
We don't need (and probably don't want) full functional Von Neumann machines.