Asgardia Becomes the First Nation Deployed in Space (cnet.com)

An anonymous reader quotes CNET: An Orbital ATK Antares rocket carrying a cubesat named Asgardia-1 launched from NASA's Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia early Sunday. The milk carton-sized satellite makes up the entirety of territory of the self-proclaimed "Space Kingdom" of Asgardia... Over 300,000 people signed up online to become "citizens" of the nation over the last year. The main privilege of citizenship so far involves the right to upload data to Asgardia-1 for safekeeping in orbit, seemingly far away from the pesky governments and laws of Earth-bound countries...

As of now, Asgardia's statehood isn't acknowledged by any other actual countries or the United Nations, and it doesn't really even fit the definition of a nation since it's not possible for a human to physically live in Asgardia. Not yet, at least. The long-term vision for Asgardia includes human settlements in space, on the moon and perhaps even more distant colonies.
On Tuesday Orbital ATK's spacecraft will dock with the International Space Station for a one-month re-supply mission -- then blast higher into orbit to deploy the space kingdom's satellite. "Asgardia space kingdom has now established its sovereign territory in space," read an online statement.

Next the space kingdom plans to hold elections for 150 Members of Parliament.

Comments

Pirate Bay Haven

[mentil]

The Pirate Bay had little luck trying to base their data out of Sealand, maybe they'll try again... IN SPAAAAACE!
I'd like to see the MAFIAA try to get their cronies to raid a satellite.
I expect that the nationality of the owner would determine the jurisdiction for crimes done involving storing data on the satellite, with a similar situation to Pitcairn Island.

I am Asgardian

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes i am. It's just fun, total bullshit, but a good idea, if it is fine right

Yeah, it sounds goofy. However...

[wjcofkc]

I think the timing is about spot of for this to be forward thinking to be not too forward thinking. The new space race is on. This time it's not just governments. Commercial interests are bent on getting people off of the planet. Between low earth orbit trips and colonizing Mars, capitalism and new enabling technologies may just be what our species needs to make up for the last 50 years of not doing much and even race past where we should already be. Human space flight has always been about politics first. I am not sure that we would have yet put people in space at all, let alone on the moon if there had not been political interests. The size of a milk carton be damned. That people can come together announce this crazy idea while also be able to launch a satellite at all is remarkable. Look at how we are taking it for granted. That in itself makes it all the incredible. So when you combine the new and newly realized commercial interests in put people in space and keeping them there combined with the new political interests prompting the governments of the world to race to the moon and stake a claim while they can, we may just be seeing the beginning of humanities future in space that should have already been realized. We just might yet survive ourselves after all

I just woke up and this could have been written better. But you get the idea.

Re:Still playing their game

[bradley13]

You are overly cynical; governments do solve a problem. Or, at least, they are supposed to solve a problem. The primary purpose of a government is to promulgate and enforce rules on personal interactions; these are the laws. The secondary purpose is to provide the citizens a means of acting collectively, for example, to hire police to enforce those laws.

In a free-wheeling anarchy (which is the libertarian utopia), there is no state, there is only private power. The dream is that the good folk will outnumber the bad folk, and be able to dominate the society. Nice dream, but human nature will ensure that this does not happen. Power will tend to accumulate in the hands of violent sociopaths. They may initially sell themselves as the hired protectors, but it won't be long before they demand protection money. Eventually, they will abuse the libertarian utopia to establish themselves as tyrants. By all reports, many people living under effective Mafia rule in Sicily are quite happy - as long as you are in the inner circle, it's great. It's less great for everyone else, especially those people who want to opt out of the protection racket, and get their kneecaps broken.

Government is an attempt by the "good guys" to solve these problems. We haven't got it quite right yet - our governments take on lives of their own, and get out of control. The current batch is going to have to be replaced at some point (and the politicians losing power are not going to like this). But first, we need better ideas, and we don't have them:

- The progressives yearning for communism, socialist or fascism (which is just socialism under another name) want to go backwards to stuff that worked even worse than what we have now.

- The conservatives basically want to "conserve" what we have now, which has mutated into crony-capitalism.

- The few libertarian idealists effectively want anarchy, which is the short road to tyranny.

What we need is an incremental improvement on democracy and capitalism, because those systems are - so far - the best we have managed. Some iteration that limits the accumulation of money and power into the hands of the 1%, while at the same time avoiding "bread and circuses" for the populist masses. The development of this incremental improvement is left as an exercise for the reader :-)