Short answers, pulled from the story.
The Outer Space Treaty signed in 1967 declared outer space to be the province of all mankind. No country could own the Moon or any other celestial body under this legal framework.
Konstantin Tsiolkovsky wrote Beyond Planet Earth around 1900 to describe future space communities. He imagined travelers building greenhouses and raising crops in zero gravity during that period.
NASA found that bone density decreases by approximately one percent per month aboard the International Space Station. This loss occurs because astronauts experience microgravity environments without Earth's gravitational pull.
At 2001 market prices such a metal rich body might be worth approximately twenty trillion US dollars. Mining a small asteroid named 3554 Amun could yield thirty times more metal than humans have extracted throughout history.
Robert Zubrin named Titan the best candidate for establishing a base within the Saturn system because it represents the most hospitable extraterrestrial world available for human colonization. Atmospheric pressure at its surface reaches one point five times that of Earth despite lacking oxygen.