THE SPACE HABITAT

The largest single colony off planet Earth is in orbit. Lagrange Station is situated at L4 – the fourth Lagrange point – a gravitationally stable location in the Moon’s orbit around Earth. The central habitat, a squat, tuna-canlike cylinder, is all but lost in a wider infrastructure of support facilities: a solar sail for station-keeping, an extensive radiator farm, and ring-shaped mirrors that provide the habitat with sunlight. The interior of Lagrange is spectacular, with a farmed landscape curving up over the visitor’s head. But this is a place of work, for 10,000 people. It was from here that the first crewed Mars missions were launched.

Now, though, Lagrange’s main customer is not Mars but Earth. Led by such prestigious bodies as the Cambridge University Centre for

Climate Management, founded in 2025, largescale geoengineering initiatives are underway in an attempt to salvage Earth’s climate. Among them is ‘albedo manipulation’ – cooling the planet by reflecting or deflecting away some of the sunlight. By now, the tremendous orbital mirrors and lenses tended by Lagrange crews are themselves planetary in scale.

All this is controversial on Earth, because such solutions inevitably favour some nations over others. Amid rising sea levels, the desiccating tropics, and gathering migrant flows, there is a feeling of a slide to war.

However the citizens of Lagrange are more concerned about their own politics, rather than Earth’s. Here, on the Moon, and even on Mars, debates are underway on the future of human rights. A confined colony in space will always be an intrinsically tyrannous environment, because

all human life will depend on centrally controlled systems. Bluntly, a tyrant in control of the air supply would have the power of life and death. A new constitution, called the Cockell Protocol, named after the astrobiologist Charles Cockell, is being drafted to ensure freedom and safety. It will be a new way of living, unimagined on the Earth – and yet, as many point out, with lessons for the inhabitants of that small world.

And on the Moon, at least, with the first children born there already in their teens, the right to freedom and self-governance is high on the agenda. This comes to a head in 2045, a century after the first use of atomic weapons in war. When the US attempts to set up a nuclear weapons site at its own Moon base, the lunar colonies – including the American ones – declare unilateral independence. A new nation is born, the first in space.