Earth's Moon is a hub of interplanetary transport and travel. Most space traffic to and from Earth comes through the many Lunar landing- and launchpads. The low gravity makes Lunar **electromagnetic linear acceleration mass driver launch pads** much more efficient than those on Terran spaceports. Since Luna lacks Earth's dense debris field, long-distance launches and landings are much safer and easier to conduct.

The biggest settlements on the Moon serve as cargo hubs between various Lunar mining operations, factories, and the rest of the Inner System. The biggest employers on the Moon are associated with Lunar Extractive Industries Consortium (LEIC), an administrative umbrella organization that manages a large array of mining and refining companies dotting the Lunar surface. In terms of government, most Lunar settlements belong to the Trans-Euroasian Compact (TEC). LEIC and TEC work closely together, with many Lunar citizens originating from the vast sprawls in Northern Eurasia. One major exception and ongoing point of contention is the Far Side settlement Pueblo Bolivar of the League of Progressive Peoples' remnant state on Earth.

Luna's population stands at about 500 million people. About 300 million live on the moon permanently. However life on the Moon is not easy. Lunar gravity is too low and ambient radiation far too high for human beings to survive in longer than a few months at a time. Several countermeasures exist to either ameliorate the effects of extended microgravity exposure with frequent medical nanobot injections or through genetic therapy. Radiation is generally kept in check with heavy shielding and radiation scrubber injections. Citizens employed in LEIC operations will receive frequent and mandatory nanite injections. These injections are extremely costly and are deducted from worker's paychecks. More affluent citizens will seek out Venusian genetic engineering companies which will fix their genetic code into one that can survive in microgravity and tolerate higher radiation levels.

Pueblo Bolivar offers their own solutions against microgravity sickness, at a much lower price point than anything offered by the corporations.

However, if a citizen of the TEC wishes to remain employed while living in a Lunar settlement, they must not participate in Bolivarian microgravity treatment, which is banned by law in all TEC colonies. Having undergone Bolivarian treatment bars a citizen from gainful employment in most, if not all, TEC / LEIC installations. The Bolivarian treatment is not licensed under TEC laws, making the citizens' bodies effectively illegal contraband. This has led to a strict stratification of Lunar society: those who have legally become capable of survival, those who are wholly dependent on their employer providing countermeasures, those who have illegally become capable of survival but cannot join the Bolivarians and thus end up living in squalor or criminality, unable to find gainful, legal employment, and those doomed to a slow, excrutiating death who have lost their job, and whose quickly deteriorating health bars employers from hiring them, thus blocking them from either accessing anti-microgravity treatment or from buying passage off Luna.

Since most nanomachines were manufactured on Earth, the Bracer War and the isolation of Earth produced a plethora of issues for the Lunar government. Unlike on Mars, the spread of unlicensed nanobot treatments was immediately and harshly cracked down upon by Luna Control. The corporate government in cooperation with engineers from Venus instead put all efforts into creating nanomachine production facilities on the Moon itself. Still, many Lunarians sought Martian contraband nanomedicines during this time. Some lost their citizenship licenses over these trespasses. Like on Mars, anti-space born illness nanomedications remain an important factor in Lunar social disciplining of the workforce. Next to Mars, the Lunar population is a driving factor in the continuing existence of the Martian Underground, as well as the stubborn foothold this terrorist organization has in the sympathy of many ordinary people.

The Martian Civil War had its most devastating impact on the Moon, when a mining payload from Mercury slammed into the Boltzmann settlement, killing a hundred thousand people. The Lunar population still has not quite recovered from the trauma the incident caused.