Scientists Create Asgardia, the First Ever Nation in Space, and You Can Join

If you had enough of the often-depressing world events and the seemingly unresolvable conflicts they engender, you might want to head for space and join the first-ever “nation state in space” that’s been announced by a team of scientists and legal experts. It’s called Asgardia and anyone can become its citizen.

As the site for the project explains, Asgardia is a name that comes from Norse mythology, where Asgard was the name of a city in the sky. In the Marvel universe, Asgardia was built was Tony Stark and ruled by the All-Mother (since Odin was in exile).

Asgardia is the brain-child of the accomplished Russian scientist and businessman Igor Ashurbeyli, who describes the motivation behind this endeavor as an attempt to create a nation founded on “Peace in Space, and the prevention of Earth’s conflicts being transferred into space.” The idea is to create a “mirror of humanity in space” in low-Earth orbit that would be devoid of Earthly divisions based on borders and religions. As Ashurbeyli says: “In Asgardia we are all just Earthlings!” 

Besides avoiding Earth-linked divisions, another key goal for the nation would be to protect Earth from space threats, like comets, asteroids, debris, cosmic radiation and infection by extraterrestrial microorganisms.

To make this space nation a reality, Ashurbeyli wants it to achieve recognition from the United Nations, aiming to have a million people sign up to become the new country’s citizens via their website. The initial citizens are likely to be those who work in the space industry already, but anyone can join. The initial goal for the founders was to get 100,000 citizens to sign up, but the number of interested people hit 300K in less than a week and is going up rapidly.