"Long story short? I'm from a world where the earth was supposedly unlivable after a nuclear apocalypse. Grew up on a space station. There was a system failure, Earth was the only option. Except radiation was a thing, so the people in charge took a bunch of us delinquents that'd been locked up -- if you were under seventeen and committed some kind of crime, you got locked up until you were eighteen, after that and it was out the airlock with you -- and sent us down to the ground."
His smile turned a little darker, a little angrier. "Because of course that's what you do when you want to know if it's safe or a death planet, you send down people that'll just get floated anyway. People who can't say no. People who probably won't be missed."
Or who, like him, didn't have anybody left to miss them.