The moon is a good staging area for rocket launches because of the low gravity but the moon wars will be rough on it i bet and its not like there is a glut of material we can strip from them unlike asteroids and if we destroy it we are gonna be really messed up as a planet.
Plus low gravity is almost worse than no gravity really. We cant spin the moon around faster but we can strap some asteroids together and make some weird stations with lots of metals that are right there. Low gravity of the moon and Mars actually will likely cause so many clots that you end up blind within 7 years and dead shortly after and we cant easily mimic or add more gravity.
Venus and jupiter both strike me as floating habitation if we ever get there but the moons of jupiter are fantastic and also 5 and a half years of flying away. So not gonna be a super useful base unless we figure out a different means of travel.
Im still a big fan of Europa and finding out if we do have an alien competition in this solar system.
I studied theoretical astrophysics and astro xenobiology and part of a thought experiment we did was on the long term affects of low gravity habitation. While we mostly have zero gravity studies the whole 1/3rd or less of our gravity makes some extrapolations pretty simple like cell wall thinning and the whole clots thing, and the small cardiovascular tubes of the eyes make for some good starting points to notice the effects, especially blindness.
But yeah the physical moving items with friction in a light gravity situation pose a pretty big issue for those rotating rings. While a lashed together collection of asteroids can be pretty rough but in a no gravity situation can be operated like a space station of its own. And a large station can be spun slower than the small rings needed for a planetary surface. Recent short paper on this https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20210019591/downloads/ICES-2021-142.pdf
For Jupiter that is some really sci-fi stuff i have seen for it but essentially we could build a vacuum based balloon, the high amounts of hydrogen and helium make for great fuel resources and there are lots of other materials immediately in the area and water from Jupiter’s atmosphere. Though the physics on the dirigible are silly and way far from something we are doing soon and so is any of this kind of speculation.
Unfortunately the nearest and most likely option is the ugly we go out and start grabbing asteroids and making a really ugly space station that works.
And also robots are not an option. You have clearly never sat on a clean meeting from COSPAR’s Planetary Prevention policies. We get zero room for contamination to the poont where my mentor just suggested shooting a solid copper ball from orbit and collecting the exploding dust since it was the only way to follow all the protocols. Once people stop caring, people are cheaper, less rare, and have their own fabrication system built in.