The Moon is a pretty barren place. Sure, there are a few buggies, some golf balls, a flag, urine bags, a family photo. But it’s mostly empty. If a company called ispace has its way, though, Earth’s closest space neighbor will soon(ish) be the site of a bustling, industrial city full of workers and tourists. Moon Valley, the dreamers call it. Yesterday, those dreamers announced the first small step in that journey, declaring that SpaceX Falcon 9 rockets will take an ispace orbiter-lander and its rovers to the Moon in 2020 and 2021.

After that, the plan goes, frequent missions will start scaffolding the infrastructure to come—hunting down, for instance, water that could be used as fuel. And then the industrialization will begin, building up a “platform for steady lunar development,” according to the company’s website. Ispace has 66 employees and headquarters in three countries, and it netted around $95 million in its first funding round—more than almost any space company, ever. One of its money-making ideas is to attach customers' payloads to its future rovers and landers.

Ispace's lunar ambitions are not unique. The Moon is maybe space’s hottest cold place right now: Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin has a lunar settlement on the brain. Smaller organizations like SpaceIL and Moon Express, once contenders for the Google Lunar X Prize, are going forward alone. Then there's the Indian government's Chandrayaan-2 mission, with its lunar orbiter, lander, and rover. China’s Chang’e 4 is similar. Trump is urging NASA to visit that gray lady first, then jet on to red Mars. The list of lunar ambitions is long. But the reasons to make the Moon into a destination stem equally from its proximity, its personality, and political and financial whims—a fixture of space policy.

People love to quote the John F. Kennedy speech that set off the Apollo era. “We choose to go to the Moon,” they say, feeling important. If they are also feeling verbose, they quote more of Kennedy's words: “We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.” Sometimes they simply say, "Space is hard,” usually as an excuse for delays and accidents.

Space types allude to this speech more than maybe anything else, except small steps and giant leaps. This linguistic fondness reveals how much today's explorers long for those good old days, or at least how much they love their own origin story. A few weeks ago, when SpaceX announced it would launch a billionaire and seven creatives to lunar orbit, billionaire Yusaku Maezawa said, “I choose to go to the Moon with artists.” His use of the first-person shows how spaceflight has changed in the past 50 years.

Nevertheless, Maezawa could reuse Kennedy’s phrasing because SpaceX is doing essentially the same thing NASA did a half-century ago. Been there, done that, if differently. And so we might be better served by quoting a different part of Kennedy’s speech: “But why, some say, the Moon?” he asked. “Why choose this as our goal?” Kennedy’s queries were rhetorical, their answers provided in other paragraphs: being first, establishing peaceful purpose, doing it because it’s hard, going because it’s there. But today, it’s a more complicated question with complicated answers.

Ispace, and other organizations with their eyes on lunar resources, are looking to develop both the Moon and an economy around it. That changed Moon could be a launchpad and refueling station for trips venturing farther afield. It could be a scientific research hub. A place to learn how to live and work long-term in an isolated place without an atmosphere. A national security outpost. An Apollo-esque beat ya.