Gleiphnir

What I think a great thing to look to the future of Science in KSP, is to have like a whole new expansion to the Tech Tree. And this new tech tree will have Celestial research where you can literally establish a mining colonies, actual functional bases, etc. So like you can conduct "X" number of specific Scientific Research ie Location of fuel reservoirs, Iron deposits etc, then in each respective Planet you can research in the tech tree, a specific Scientific Building. So like a brand spanking new Moon Base would cost somewhere around 2000 tech for example, along with having an actual economic cost, since people really want to have an economy in KSP. Now the actual implementation can either be you just research the buildings, and they magically pop up in predefined locations from the dev team, OR like everything else in KSP you have to bring you're brand spanking new Fuel Base, Vehicle Assembly Base, Research Base etc, with you to wherever it needs to go, and it will have specific coding to make sure that it only functions properly when all the previous research is done.