This seems as good a moment as any, as we await both the birth of our Lord and the launch of James Webb, to take stock on astrophysics. From last December to this one. Actually from March to now, when I'd "sage'd this post" indexing my work.
First up, which happened (too) late here, we solved the Venus problem - that is, the means to shift freight from Venus' floating cities to the LVO. That shall be done by Paul Birch's orbiting magnetic ring. This incidentally also stands to cool the place. Post, un-sage'd!
Before we get that ring (with elevator) built up, consider more cloud-to-LVO rocketry. This also took awhile to find but: Lightcraft, especially if it ends with a tether.
Last winter we found free-return Venus/Earth cyclers which weren't Hohmann. One was the 2L4 - which gets only as far as STL1; the other (superior) was 3-0-2-9 or, if you like, 1.5L1.
These require high-thrust manoeuvres to get in and out. To that end I sussed out the difference between NERVA and Boom Boom.
Back when I'd given up on Venus proper I did more work on SVL2 which I thought would be the only human presence in Venus' vicinity. I got very excited about Ebrahimi-Alfvén, for stationkeeping. I floated some cockamamie ideas on how to supply SVL2 with water which I'll spare you today.
Elsewhere several advances have been made in getting cargo up off our own planet into LEO, in both theory and practice. Most of those were for smallsats (Rocket Lab) or for nonfragile commodities (SpinLaunch). For a canned monkey SpaceX shows the most promise, if we let them.
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