Luna

Luna is the first human colony beyond Earth and the proving ground for the legal principle later applied to Mars: a corporation cannot own a planet, while the people who sustain an occupation may be recognized as sovereign. Its role in the novel is therefore twofold. It is a remote, difficult destination reached by a dangerous early expedition, and the precedent-setting world whose contested ownership shapes Valentine Michael Smith’s claim to Mars.

The First Interplanetary Destination

The first human expedition from Terra to Mars was launched only eight Terran years after the founding of the first human colony on Luna. At that point, interplanetary travel required weary free-fall orbits and doubly tangent semi-ellipses. The journey from Terra to Mars took 258 days, the return another 258, and the crew had to wait 455 days on Mars for the planets to realign for the return trajectory: almost three Earth years in all. Luna thus marks the early stage of human expansion that preceded the first Mars expedition.

The spacecraft Envoy could make the journey only by refueling at a space station and tacking back almost into Earth’s atmosphere. Even after reaching Mars, the ship might fail to land, find water for reaction mass, or locate food; countless other hazards could end the mission. The expedition’s planners judged the physical risks less serious than the psychological strain of eight people confined together for nearly three years. They rejected an all-male crew as socially unstable and chose four married couples, if the necessary specialties could be assembled in that combination. The voyage to Mars was therefore shaped by the difficulties already familiar from humanity’s first steps into space, including the founding of the lunar colony.

The Larkin Decision

Luna’s decisive political history begins with competing national and corporate expeditions. After an earlier Russian rocket crashed on the Moon, a United States–Canada mission returned without leaving anyone there. As the Federation-backed joint colonizing effort and a separate Russian effort prepared to follow, General Atomics sent its own expedition from an island leased from Ecuador. Its men were already established on the Moon when the Federation vessel arrived, followed by the Russian one.

General Atomics claimed Luna, but the Federation High Court rejected corporate ownership of a planet: a corporation was only a legal fiction, the court reasoned, whereas the actual occupants were flesh-and-blood people who had maintained the settlement. It recognized Larkin and his associates as a sovereign nation and admitted them to the Federation. The compromise also involved concessions to General Atomics and its subsidiary, Lunar Enterprises; it satisfied no party completely, but helped avert a direct clash among the competing powers.

The resulting Larkin Decision became a durable part of planetary law. Rules for colonizing planets were built around it and intended to avoid bloodshed. The novel presents that precedent as consequential beyond the lunar dispute: the account explicitly links the settlement of competing claims to the fact that World War Three did not arise from conflicts over space travel.

From Luna to Mars

The lunar precedent bears directly on Valentine Michael Smith. When Jubal Harshaw explains the Larkin Decision to Jill Boardman, he argues that it applies to Smith’s claim to Mars. If a corporation could not own Luna simply by asserting a claim, the legal question of Mars could not be settled by treating a company as its owner; occupation and the status of the people who maintained it mattered instead.

Luna is also connected to the later history of the Lyle Drive. Jubal identifies Dr. Mary Jane Lyle Smith as its inventor and explains that, before leaving on the expedition, she applied for numerous basic patents and placed them in a corporate trust. She assigned control and interim income to the Science Foundation, through which the government eventually gained control. The rights to the drive ultimately belonged to her son, Valentine Michael Smith, and were worth millions, perhaps hundreds of millions. The drive used by the Champion was already used by other contemporary spacecraft, linking the technology of interplanetary travel to the legal and financial consequences of the earlier expedition.

The Moon’s importance is thus not only chronological. Luna is the first settled world in the chain of expansion, the site of a conflict resolved through a compromise over sovereignty, and the legal model invoked when Smith’s rights on Mars become contested. Its history turns an apparent question of who reached a planet first into a question of who can own it, who has actually occupied it, and how rival claims can be settled without war.