"It really seems like anyone with some renders and a white paper written by someone being gassed up by an overly agreeable AI can get VC funding these days."
Those only solve for gravity, or not having to pay for fuel to keep things in orbit. Other heavenly bodies are further away, so latency becomes a big problem, followed by exponentially more power to transmit (radio) in order to maintain the same bandwidth. That and cooling: the possible candidates range from as bad as orbit to worse and much worse, all with increasing latency and power needs to boot.
Those only solve for gravity, or not having to pay for fuel to keep things in orbit. Other heavenly bodies are further away, so latency becomes a big problem, followed by exponentially more power to transmit (radio) in order to maintain the same bandwidth. That and cooling: the possible candidates range from as bad as orbit to worse and much worse, all with increasing latency and power needs to boot.
Overall, even the in-orbit version is a bad idea.