Asgardia: The first space nation?

From Bill Harby at the BBC:

As of today, I’m an official citizen of two nations. One is the US, which has 325 million citizens and an area of almost 10 million sq km. The other is Asgardia, which has some 246,000 citizens, but physically exists for now only in the form of a 6lb (2.7kg) bread-box-size satellite floating in low-Earth orbit since November 2017.

One day, Asgardia plans to have an enormous “space ark” orbiting our home world, a colony on the Moon, and perhaps even further in the future on other “celestial bodies”, according to the constitution.

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The nation’s ‘leader’, Igor Raufovich Ashurbeyli, isn’t joking around. According to his CV, the Azerbaijani billionaire has been involved in publishing, telecommunications, science education and in consulting on space threat defence, nanotechnology, and aerospace research. He also rose to become CEO for Almaz-Antey, a large Russian state-owned defense contractor that builds missile systems and other military hardware. After leaving the company, he turned to building cathedrals in Russia.

And on 25 June in Vienna, Austria, he became Asgardia’s first “Head of Nation.”

Continue reading at BBC.com…

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