Are We There Yet?

Habitation designs and technologies are almost ready to make life possible in outer space

- Akshit Sangomla

ON APRIL 18, 003, as per Asgardian calendar, or on April 12, 2019, as per the Gregorian calendar, the national parliament of Asgardia confirmed all its ministers and committee chairs. The head of the nation, Russian scientist and billionaire Igor Ashurbeyli administered the oath of office to the newly appointed leaders. The nation does not exist on Earth, but in space, in the future. Its only physical form, as of now, is a CubeSat Asgardia-1, a bread-box-sized satellite floating in the low Earth orbit with half-a-terabyte data related to the virtual nation’s constitution, national symbols and details of its million population. Ashurbeyli now wants the UN to acknowledge Asgardia's sovereignty Another group of people, led by American businessman Dennis Hope, have also approached the UN and filed a declaration of ownership over properties they have bought on extra-terrestrial bodies. Hope is the founder of Lunar Embassy, which he claims is “the only company in the world to possess a legal basis and copyright for the sale of land on the Moon, and other extraterrestrial property within the solar system”. Since 1980, he has sold 247 million hectares on the moon, and some on Mars, Venus, Mercury and IO, a satellite of Jupiter.

Are they just dream sellers? Early this year, Mars One, which initiated the world's first crowdsourced-effort to create a colony on the red planet and signed on thousands of volunteers for the one-way mission, was declared bankrupt. While the Dutch startup is now accused of being a scam, several individuals and organizations, including government agencies, are working overtime to develop technologies and gathering knowledge to make life possible in space.