Seriously, I didn't mention rockets at all, did I?
I love the space elevator/beanstalk idea, but we're several human generations away from the first full-scale model. For getting on and off of planets and moons, I think we'll probably have transorbital skyhooks first. A grappling device at the end of a space-anchored cable will periodically swing down and "catch" high-altitude flying launch vehicles, moving at sub-escape speed, to pull them onward into space itself. Another grappler on the other end of the cable serves as the counterweight, which holds another vehicle headed home. The cable is far shorter than a space elevator, and the system is essentially in low orbit, rotating around a shifting point somewhere along the cable.
Typical interplanetary propulsion will be through solar wind sails, ion thrusters and maybe nuclear rockets. It's going to be slow, so there will be swarms of roomy interplanetary "ocean liners" on permanent tour between the Solar System's destinations, following meandering paths which again, cost very little in energy but take their time. These will be like mini-colonies, but with mostly temporary residents. Perhaps colonists will get some practice here for life in their future home.
Earth-moon-Lagrangian and inter-colony transportation may be through a network of space-slingshots much like the skyhook. AKA "rotovators" or space tethers. Freight and passenger modules are caught on one end of an anchored cable, whirled around, and released at just the right time to send them on to their destination, or yet another slingshot. This system relies on precision timing, but is extremely low-cost in terms of energy. Folks could board on Earth at a relatively conventional airport, and ride in the same seats all the way to the colonies or interplanetary 'liners.
If we're to make nuclear rockets routine, we'll first need to have already reached the asteroid belt - and gotten lucky with what resources we found there. If we're to make antimatter rockets routine, we'll need to have already built immense production facilities in Mercury orbit. And there's the problem of thousands of these torchships pointing their ultra-radioactive exhaust here and there.
So; a few hundred more years of chemical rockets, yeah. They'll still be heavy, complex, dangerous and expensive. And why go through all that just to get to and from solid ground when we have materials floating around everywhere, and can build our own habitats to fit our biological needs precisely. We just wait for the robots to finish a new colony, then we toss a can of settlers at it, lol. The issue with gravity isn't whether the plumbing works. It's that our bodies work properly only under 1G. It's far easier and cheaper to build space colonies with the proper characteristics, than it is to rebuild a lethal world or breed a new species tolerant of inhuman environments.
Oh, and if you want to cool Venus down with a solar shade, you'll first need a society stable enough to maintain a complicated, expensive project for many millions of years. Venus doesn't shed much heat, and it isn't absorbing much any more, either. The clouds are very reflective. Once Venus is stripped and chilled, you'll still just have a nice, cool sterile rock. Venus won't be of much use until we can disassemble and reassemble matter itself.
