Twenty Five Years Without the Moon

Today is 13 September 2024 CE. On this date in 1999, an accident at a nuclear waste storage facility on the Moon caused the accumulated waste to ignite. The resulting explosion was of sufficient duration and force to accelerate the Moon out of Earth's orbit, with devastating effects upon the Earth, from which it might never fully recover. The fate of the 300-odd residents of Moonbase Alpha, Earth's first permanent base on another body, along with Commissioner Simmonds of the International Lunar Commission, remains a mystery, but all are presumed dead.

Indeed, it's now been long enough that, even aside from the high probability that everyone died in the initial "Breakaway" incident, several residents of Alpha would likely be gone by now. Professor Victor Bergman, world-renown astrophysicist, was visiting Alpha to work on issues around the Meta Probe, for example, and was well into his 60s at the time.

But Bergman was only one of the dozens of Meta Probe Project astronauts and engineers lost in the event. The probe had been intended to explore the eccentric planet Meta that had wandered into the Solar System some years before. The construction platform and the probe ship were torn apart by gravitational forces as the Moon pushed away from Earth. Planet Meta remains an unexplored mystery, as Earth has been too busy picking up the pieces from the Moon's Breakaway to contemplate building another probe.

To this day, no one knows how or why the nuclear waste pile on the Moon ignited, let alone how it provided enough energy to tear the Moon out of orbit yet leave both it, and the Earth, intact. Most scientists continue to insist that it should have been impossible.

Yet, the fact remains: the Moon is gone. Young adults now coming into the job market have lived their entire lives in a shattered world with no waxing and waning orb in the night sky. Human-caused climate-change, which already was on track to have devastating effects by now, has only been compounded by the loss of the Moon's tidal effects on Earth.