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SHACKLETON BASE, JULY 2069 – The habitat’s carbon-fibre dome glistens as the lunar day dawns. Inside, men and women are tending to rows of tomato plants, the leaves curled towards the sun, the trusses bearing huge fruit. Growing in gravity that is just 17 per cent of Earth’s, the plants’ fuzzy stalks don’t need help carrying their load, so they spread widely.

Some of the tomatoes are almost ripe, and will make a fine welcome treat for the new arrivals in a couple of Earth-days, coming for the 100th anniversary ceremony.

A century ago, humans went to the moon “not because it was easy, but because it was hard”. And to beat the communists. In 2069, humans go for many reasons. Some are drawn to the bleak beauty of this place. Others are more interested in making life-saving drugs or fibre-optic cables with better quality than is possible on Earth. And there is a good deal of money to be made too. People pay a lot for tomatoes, textiles and art from the moon.

But none of this would be possible if, 50 years earlier, people hadn’t decided to go back, for reasons including the simple fact that they could.

Shackleton Base is imaginary, for now. What is real is this: a generation after the Apollo missions, the people preparing to visit the moon look different to their forebears. They aren’t all white American men, for a start (for all that the Soviet Union made the running early on in the space race, when it came to putting someone on the moon, it never really got close). Neither are they all specially trained astronauts; they include artists and billionaires. There are people from China, Japan and Europe, and many will launch far from Cape Canaveral. Once they reach their destination, they might live in inflatable shelters, single-occupancy domes connected like Lego bricks and larger 3D-printed habitats. And once they arrive, they will change the moon and our relationship with it for good.

Most of the countries and companies vying to go back to the moon will want to claw back some of their huge investments, so mining is likely to be one of the first activities on the agenda. Water will probably be the most valuable resource on Earth’s satellite, at least to begin with. It could be split into hydrogen and oxygen to make rocket fuel for return trips to Earth and other planets or to be burned to generate power. Water prospecting is likely to draw people to the moon’s shadowed craters, especially at the south pole, where spacecraft have sniffed its presence for the past decade.

Under NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services programme, private firms are competing for grants to design spacecraft that can deliver various landers and instruments, including some that can search for resources like water. In March, when US vice-president Mike Pence directed NASA to return humans to the moon by 2024 for a landing at the south pole, he highlighted its abundant water.

But water harvesting is only one element of the moon’s possible future. It can be more than a place where people are allowed to extract resources for profit. Perhaps it will end up as an environmental reserve, where mining is banned but tourists can enjoy hiking trips, albeit pretty extreme trips. Or it could be a bastion of research for its own sake, much like Antarctica’s various scientific outposts.

Now is the time to decide, according to anthropologists who study space exploration. To figure out what the next crop of moonwalkers will look like, we must first decide why we want to send them, says , an anthropologist at Yale University. “What I want for our spacefaring future is honesty about our reasons for going,” she says. “Apollo was as much political as it was anything else, but it was always couched in the language of science and human ingenuity, and I think that led to the kinds of people who were selected and who went.”

The Apollo astronauts were mostly pilots with a penchant for danger, hastily trained in geology during field expeditions to Arizona and Iceland. Just one geologist, Harrison “Jack” Schmitt, went to the moon, on Apollo 17, though he also advised other missions. Messeri says more inclusive lunar futures are only possible if mission planners are clear about what they want.

“If we are going for mining, then say that; say this is what we want to invest in. If it’s to expand human frontiers or inspire the next generation, then great, send artists,” Messeri says. “We can make the decision as a community to spend a huge amount of money to send artists to space, and that seems to me as legitimate and worthy as sending a bunch of miners.”

Last year, Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa made headlines when he bought all the seats on a SpaceX capsule that the company’s CEO Elon Musk wants to send around the moon in 2023. Maezawa said he planned to bring artists and performers, who would be commissioned to create new works inspired by what they see. “If John Lennon could have seen the curvature of the Earth, what kind of songs would he have written?” he said at the time.

Maezawa’s plan contrasts with the way Musk often talks about future space settlements on the moon and Mars, says , an astronomer at the Adler Planetarium in Chicago. She says she finds a lot of his rhetoric objectionable, partly because it doesn’t imagine an inclusive future and partly because he uses inappropriate language. Using terms like “colonising” space, for example, recalls a violent history of colonial subjugation, which continues to exclude people of colour and women from the imagined future of space, she says. “I felt it was not only harmful to the way we imagine space exploration, but that it whitewashes a lot of history on Earth.”

In a gesture towards inclusivity, NASA’s administrator announced that the Artemis programme to return humans to the moon by 2024, will include the first woman among its crew. Named after Apollo’s sister, a Greek goddess of the moon, the mission will include an orbiting lunar space station enabling sorties to the moon’s surface.

China is also developing the hardware it will need to land its taikonauts on the moon. In 2018, the country accelerated development of its Long March 9 rocket, similar in size to the Saturn V that launched the Apollo missions. Chinese officials have said the rocket will power its first lunar surface missions in the 2030s. China’s plans may be one reason for the sudden US interest in returning to the moon within the next five years, instead of NASA’s original plan for a 2028 time frame.

If the next moonwalkers aren’t Chinese taikonauts or female NASA crew members searching for water, maybe they will be space miners sent by Jeff Bezos. In May, the Amazon boss, also founder of rocket company Blue Origin, unveiled a new lunar lander design called Blue Moon. He said the lander would help NASA meet Trump’s goal to send astronauts to the moon by 2024. “It’s time to go back to the moon, this time to stay,” Bezos said during the announcement.

Citizens of the moon

If China, the US and private companies make it to the moon, they might encounter an international , a plan espoused by the European Space Agency’s director general, Jan Woerner. Future moon citizens could include all of the above, mixing jobs and objectives. Taikonauts exploring at the south pole may, for instance, cross paths with radio astronomers erecting an observatory on the moon’s far side. From that vantage point, the moon blocks radio transmissions and noise leaking from Earth. This real estate is potentially so valuable that Claudio Maccone at the National Institute for Astrophysics in Italy recently . If that is to be realised, governments and private entities may need to establish firmer rules for how the moon should be used.

Some argue that the moon should be treated like a national park, with rules designed to keep it pristine. But the legal framework for doing this is unclear, says , a space ethicist at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Daytona Beach, Florida. “If we want to establish some normative framework that creates a duty of humans to the moon as another environmental area, what does that mean?” she says. It could be that not just governments, but scientists and citizens ought to have a part in setting the rules.

But recognising the intrinsic value of the environment on the moon is probably going to be harder than it is on Earth, says , who studies space debris at the University of Texas at Austin. “If people don’t see it hit their pocket, they don’t get very concerned with it,” says Jah. “But near-Earth space, and other planetary resources, are a commons. It belongs to all peoples. Going by the premise of first-come, first-served, without any regard to the long-term sustainability of the environment, is just not right.”

Today, the laws of space are governed by the Outer Space Treaty of 1967, which rules that celestial bodies, including the moon, can’t be claimed by any country or enterprise. But the treaty doesn’t prohibit mining or other activities. The 108 nations that are parties to the treaty, as well as private companies, all operate as though the moon is similar to international waters. Two hundred nautical miles from a coastline, the oceans belong to everyone and no one. The countries that can access that territory will be the first to access its contents, and possibly get rich from it.

There is one other perspective to consider: that of the moon itself. An average person’s lifespan is a blip compared with the time that has elapsed since the moon formed. “This gives humans a very unrealistic sense of time, with a sense of urgency to accomplish as much as possible within those 70 years,” wrote , at the University of Manchester, UK, in a recent . She argues that a truly sustainable lunar environment would mean leaving it alone.

“The celestial body closest to the Earth is an important, powerful and fragile environment that needs to be understood and taken into consideration before we set sail to it again,” she wrote. “Have we ever asked why humans want to return to the moon and then colonise it? There is a need to acknowledge the moon as an entity beyond ourselves that needs to be respected.”

Walkowicz says the next wave of lunar missions can do better if we think ahead and have inclusivity in mind. “Going to space is hard. If it’s going to be hard in the engineering sense, then why pretend that the human community and inclusion is too hard?” Walkowicz says. “If we’re going to be patting ourselves on the back for doing the hard things, we might as well do all of them.”