The Moon Failure

Since A View that Lacks Stars is a SF novel, taking place on a space station, I knew I had to address space colonization. Because of course humanity would have reached it by the novel date. (which I still have to figure out - 2215 maybe?)

Only, in this story, colonization experienced a huge tragedy - the Moon. It had been all fine and dandy for awhile, but then something with wrong with the domes the colonists lived under. There was an atmospheric leak and thousands died. Two domes managed to survive, leaving a hundred living on the satellite. They managed to fix the leaks and resume life on the Moon, but people were now so terrified of a similar catastrophe that no one visited the Moon after that.

A lunar outpost, as imagined by NASA. Taken from Wikipedia.

In fact, all domed terraforming and colonization stopped and Earth looked for worlds to colonize that had pre-exisiting atmospheres. Of course, those atmospheres were played with a bit and people still often live in artificial environments, but not in places where a step outside would kill you.

The Moon Failure, as it became known, was the biggest influence for the colonization practices for the Modified Human Colonial Union. Instead of terraforming planets and moons, they planetformed humans.