Islands in the Sky

It's old-science fiction, so we get things like creatures living on Mercury and space stations that can beam television programs all around the world. But it's fun. The way to handle these books is to view them as historic documents from an alternate universe in which people really did colonize the moon and find life there, and that their future has diverged significantly from ours. Why else would space be so male and white in 2070 or so?