The space nation of Asgardia has launched its first satellite. The Antares launch vehicle, launched on November 12 from the Wallops cosmodrome, launched the Cygnus space truck into orbit, on which, in addition to the cargo intended for the ISS, the Asgardia-1 cubesat was also flying.
Today Cygnus will dock to the ISS, and in a month it will undock and rise a little higher; there, in low earth orbit, the satellite will separate. The satellite, the size of a sliced loaf, carries 512 GB of data - the constitution of the state of Asgardia, the flag, coat of arms and data of 115 thousand citizens.
Asgardia was invented and proclaimed a year ago by Russian businessman Igor Ashurbeyli (we wrote about Asgardia in detail in the article "Citizens of Free Space"). The first space state has no territory yet; its creators dream of orbital cities and colonies on other planets, but so far they are limited to launching orbital memory cards carrying personal data of citizens. When Asgardia-1 enters orbit, its data will be available through the telecommunications satellites of the Globalstar system.
Parliamentary elections are in full swing in Asgardia: each citizen can vote for the candidate he likes or propose his own candidacy. With the state system in the state, everything is complicated: Asgardia is called a space kingdom, the head of state, by default the founder is Igor Ashurbeyli, the constitution, adopted by universal Internet voting, proclaims the power of the people and broad powers of the parliament. You can independently figure out the tricks of the state structure of Asgardia by studying the documents on the website asgardia.space. You can become a citizen by filling out a form on the same website; more than three thousand Russians have already done this, including one editor of Popular Mechanics.