...But Because They Are Hard

In 2023, after a decade and a half of planning, unmanned lunar missions, and finally manned lunar orbits, the China National Space Agency achieved the main goal of the Chang'e 9 mission successfully placing a lander on the Moon in the Mare Vaporum. Under the command of veteran taikonaut Liu Yang, who became the first woman to set foot on a celestial body outside of Earth, the three person crew spent two full days on the lunar surface before touching down in the South China Sea a little more than a week after they had launched from Hainan, being recovered by the aircraft carrier Liaoning. After disembarking in Hong Kong, the crew toured southeastern China by rail before arriving in Beijing to enormous fanfare. The Golden Age of Lunar Exploration had begun.

China was soon followed by the Europeans, Americans, Japanese, Indians, Russians, and finally the Brazilians, whose Jaci-1 landing in 2035 made them the last of what would, by the middle of the century, be recognized as the major spacefaring powers, bringing the Golden Age to a close but opening a new age, one not of exploration but colonization.

Two events precipitated the colonial boom. The first, the Shanghai Lunar Near Side Accords, was precipitated by the increasing consensus that the ban on territorial claims on extraterrestrial bodies was outdated, and despite heated disputes between the United States and China on the extent of China's territorial claims, was signed by the spacefaring powers in 2055 (although the United States signed "with reservations"). The second was a breakthrough in science in 2061, which definitively proved that gravity could be manipulated in a localized context using ultra short-waved photons passing through hidden dimensions. By 2078, artificial gravity fields large and powerful enough to allow a dome city on the Moon to enjoy Earth-like gravity were available.

Nearly four decades later, those thin pole-to-pole strips of land are becoming more and more important; as a small release valve for overpopulation on Earth, as mining colonies for natural resources which are becoming ever more scarce, providing a convenient base for deeper space exploration and more asteroid mining, precision manufacturing in low gravity, and with cheapening costs of space travel, the incredible oppertunity of touring the Moon. Unfortunately, this has also meant increased tensions on the Moon, most notably the Sino-American border dispute but also the headaches of prospecting rover crews with not quite enough respect or knowledge of local borders.

A lunar dome city is a little different from a normal city on Earth, and not just in the obvious ways. They abound with greenery and ponds, which serve a practical as well as aesthetic function; the former providing residents with some of their food and more crucially recycling the dome's atmosphere, the later storing the water residents need to drink, bathe, and maintain the former. This water, of course, is also highly recycled. Underneath the city center, gravity generators hum away, creating Earth-like gravity in the inner city and residential suburbs, while exurban gravity is kept low; factories which benefit from lower-than-Earth gravity are located here.

Outside the domes, all cites have some sort of spaceport facility, as the only form of ground transportation present on the entirety of the Moon is arduous rover journies; dome cities like Bingyuan or Three Craters City are easier to reach from Shanghai or New York than from Armstrong City or Changzhen. However, many cities now have rail links for freight and passenger travel; a fairly well developed network criscrosses the Brazilian, Chinese, European, Nordic, and Russian territories and a line links the cities of Chandrapura, Frobisher, and Tsuki-no-Miyako (The respective capitals of the Commonwealth, Indian, and Japanese territories). Low government investment, Sino-American tensions, and long distances even by lunar standards, however, have made bridging the gap and allowing, theoretically, through travel from Chandrapura to São Domingos unfeasible. Lunar trains are rather different from Earth; they employ larger rails and have underfriction wheels like rollercoaster trains to keep them on the track in low gravity.

Earth has changed as well; Brazil has now for decades been a full-fledged great power, surpassing Japan and Russia. Western (Still without the stubbornly independnt British) and Central Europe have federated into the European Federal Republic and Denmark, Iceland, Norway, and Iceland into the Nordic Federation (Which forms along with Estonia, Finland, Greenland, and Latvia the Nordic Cooperation Council). Hispanic immigration and the admission of Puerto Rico as a state left a profound influence on the United States, citizens of which now call themselves in both languages "Estado-Unidosense". China held a fully free and fair Presidential election in 2032 (Which was won by the Communists anyway) and by the middle of the century had become a de jure federation and reincorporated Taiwan.

China now has a system somewhere between what we would call dominant party and two and a half party; a more or less permanent electoral alliance between the unlikely allies of the Communists and the Kuomintang espousing economic corporatism, social conservatism, and a cautious, realist foreign policy still dominates the political scene, but is occasionaly knocked out of power by the Democratic, Liberal, and National League (Quite a mouthful, so everyone, Anglophone or Sinophone, calls it the Minziguo for short, the Chinese character abbreviation for that roughly, and fittingly, meaning "A Country for the People Themselves"), which, as the party of the educated middle class, supports economic and social liberalism and an aggressive sort of nationalism that heavily colors their foreign policy. Forming the "and a half" is the Peasants' and Workers' Democratic Party, a former part of the CPC's united front gone rogue (And also gone a little neo-Maoist, a la a party of 22nd century Bo Xilai impersonators but hopefully with less crazy).

One notes that despite not being spacefaring powers themselves, the British and the Scandinavians managed to get their own colonies, which has to do with the structure of the European Space Agency and a rather liberal reading of the Shanghai Treaty; all nations possessing space programs with lunar landing capability were given the right to make a claim, and since the ESA remained multinational as a part of a "variable geometry Europe" approach, this technically included not just the EFR but also several other states. Canada and the UK took full advantage of this to carve out their own slice of the lunar pie, as did the Nordic Cooperation Council.