(CNN) The world's first "space nation" has taken flight.

On November 12, Asgardia cemented its presence in outer space by launching the Asgardia-1 satellite.

The "nanosat" -- it is roughly the size of a loaf of bread -- undertook a two-day journey from NASA's Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia, the United States, to the International Space Station (ISS).

It contains 0.5 TB of data belonging to 18,000 of Asgardia's citizens, such as family photographs, as well as digital representations of the space nation's flag, coat of arms and constitution.

Asgardia, world's first 'space nation', takes flight Asgardia is the brainchild of scientist Dr Igor Ashurbeyli, who wants to create a nation in space for earthlings. While human settlements in space are envisioned in the future, for the time being Asgardia is cementing its presence in space with a satellite. Launched in November, it contains data of 18,000 "Asgardians." "I would like to see settlements on the moon in my lifetime -- and I am 53 years old now," he told CNN. A rendering shows spacecrafts in the low-earth orbit with the Grand Canyon in the background. The next step for Asgardia? Working towards a submission to the UN for recognition as a nation. Asgardia has to gain recognition from other countries as a state before it can proceed. Here, a rendering by Asgardia shows Saturn through the window of a spacecraft.

Russian scientist Dr Igor Ashurbeyli founded the world's first independent nation to operate in outer space in October 2016.

Named after a Norse mythological city of the skies, Asgardia is free to join and so far, about 114,000 people have signed up.

Ashurbeyli says the project's mission is to provide a "peaceful society", offer easier access to space technologies, and protect Earth from space threats, such as asteroids and man-made debris in space.

While Asgardia's citizens will -- for the time being -- remain based on earth, the satellite launch brings the nation one step closer to space.

The satellite's mission

Asgardia-1 made its journey to the ISS aboard the OA-8 Antares-Cygnus, a NASA commercial cargo vehicle.

Now it must wait for about three weeks as vital supplies and scientific equipment are transferred from the NASA ship to the six people currently living at the ISS.

Life in space: Soon to be a reality? Spaceship company SpaceX, headed by Tesla CEO Elon Musk, is taking two thrill seekers on a trip around the moon in 2018. It's not the first exciting feat for the pioneering firm: in 2017, it successfully launched a used rocket, the Dragon (pictured), into space. Behrokh Khoshnevis, a professor in engineering at the University of Southern California, invented the 3D-printing technology Contour Crafting. He's been working with NASA on the possibility of building a colony on Mars since 2011 and believes that humans can soon do so using the method. The Space Exploration Architecture and Clouds Architecture Office took home first prize for their "Ice House" design in NASA's 2015 3D-Printed Habitat Challenge. Japanese construction company Obayashi Corporation has been working on a space elevator concept, which would take passengers on a ride into space on a cable made of diamonds. Their researchers believe that advances in carbon nanotechnology could make a space elevator possible as soon as 2030. Virgin Galactic, headed by British tycoon Richard Branson, is racing to become the first major private space tourism company. In 2016, it unveiled the SpaceShipTwo, envisioned to travel 50 miles above the earth's surface. No flying dates have been set, however. In April 2017, NASA revealed new evidence that the most likely places to find life beyond Earth are Jupiter's moon Europa or Saturn's moon Enceladus. The Cassini spacecraft, pictured here, made the discovery. "Enceladus is high on the list in the solar system for showing habitable conditions," said Hunter Waite, lead author of the Enceladus study

The nanosat will then be detached from the NASA vehicle and begin its own orbital journey around the earth. Citizens' data will remain in orbit for between five and 18 months, the typical lifespan of this type of satellite. It will then burn out and disappear.

For Ashurbeyli, the launch fulfills a pledge he made when establishing the "space nation" to take its citizens to space via their data.

"I promised there would be a launch," he says. "We selected NASA as a reliable partner ... because we have to meet the commitments that I made 13 months ago."

Getting it off the ground

Within 40 hours of the project being announced in 2016, over 100,000 people had applied for citizenship on Asgardia's website. After three weeks, Asgardia had 500,000 applicants.

Anyone over 18 years old, with an email address, regardless of gender, nationality, race, religion, and financial standing can apply for citizenship -- including ex-convicts, provided they are clear of charges at the time of application.

A rendering of a habitable platform, which Asgardia envisions sending its citizens to in future.

Today, there are 114,000 Asgardians from 204 countries -- a population drop from 211,000 in June, when voting to determine the details of Asgardia's constitution began.

Only those who agreed to adopt the finalized constitution are counted as Asgardians.

Turkey currently has the largest number of Asgardians, with over 16,500 residents.

Rayven Sin, an artist based in Hong Kong, told CNN that she signed up to become an Asgardian in November 2016 after hearing about it on a Chinese radio show while she was in Toronto.

"I really want to be able to see if human beings are able to have more opportunity to express their opinions," she told CNN. "The society we live in now -- everything seems to be either capitalism or communism -- there's a lot of conflict.

"As a human being, I would hope (to see) if we could have other ways (of living). For a better life, and for more options."

John Spiro, a digital marketing specialist who organizes a monthly meet-up for Hong Kong-based Asgardians, told CNN it was the possibility of sending personal data into space that excited him.

"I help translate and preserve Buddhist sutras as a hobby and the symbolism of sending one of those religious texts in electronic form 'up to the heavens' seemed very nice."

Out of this world idea

After the launch of its first satellite, Asgardia plans to send a series of them into space.

Going forward, the Asgardia team hopes to create habitable platforms in low-earth orbits -- the first one located 100 to 200 miles (161 to 321 kilometers) from space, which is also where the ISS is located.

The first human flight to this location is projected to take place in eight years' time.

"We want to give equal opportunities to everyone who has a mind, who can do something, for their protection," Ashurbeyli said.

"Our real home is not the house or the city where we were born. (Our) home is planet Earth, (and) we want to protect it.

"(It's) not a fantasy. Going to Mars, the galactics, so on -- that's just fake. I intend something more real."

Further satellite launches are in the works but no dates have yet been confirmed.

Rocket scientist

A 53-year-old rocket scientist, Ashurbeyli says he is single-handedly bankrolling the project -- for a sum that's undisclosed.

Regularly reported to be a billionaire -- although he has never appeared on the Forbes rich lists -- the Azerbaijan-born Russian graduated from the Azerbaijan State Oil Academy in 1985, and three years later founded Socium, a software and consulting firm turned holding company with over 10,000 employees, according to his website.

Dr Igor Ashurbeyli

After moving to Moscow in the 1990s, he became a heavyweight in the science industry and, in 2010, was awarded the Russian State Science and Technology Prize. Three years later, he founded the Aerospace International Research Center (AIRC) in Vienna, and today he is chairman of UNESCO's Science of Space committee.

In short, Ashurbeyli is no beginner when it comes to space.

He did, however, resign from all governmental organizations in 2011, according to his website, and now claims to be politically neutral.

Imagine you lived here In 1975 a research group led by Princeton professor Gerard O'Neill conducted a 10 week study of future space colonies. The NASA-sponsored research and the paper born of it was given to artists Rick Guidice and Don Davis, commissioned to illustrate the fantastical and as yet unrealized concepts. O'Neill's team settled on three potential designs for the future space stations: the Bernal Sphere, the Toroidal Colony (pictured) and the Cylindrical Colony. Potential capacity ranged from 10,000 people to one million, and featured circular designs which rotated to generate artificial gravity. The Cylindrical Colony, the most spacious of O'Neill's concepts, had huge windows fitted to allow light to filter through to the landscapes within. The design, later dubbed the 'O'Neill Cylinder', was riffed on in Christopher Nolan's intergalactic blockbuster " Interstellar " forty years later. The Bernal Sphere was first proposed by John Desmond Bernal as far back as 1929, with O'Neill's team adapting the half-century old idea. Shrunk down to 500 meters wide they proposed a highly-curved living surface that featured a "crystal palace" for agriculture and light reflected in via windows near the poles. O'Neill in a paper presented to NASA uses 1990 as a hypothetical start date for a space colony, with the team drawing up a number of potential costs for construction and transportation -- even the volume of livestock each station would need to ship in. Rick Guidice's painting of a cutaway of the Bernal Sphere also shows some of the huge solar arrays required to power the station and its rotation. Despite the futuristic technology required to put such a massive structure in space, all of the artwork from Guidice and Davis shows lush green landscapes -- a far cry from the reality of the International Space Station today. O'Neill suggests that the compact living area of the Bernal Sphere could be offset with separate agricultural modules, spacious enough for industrial-scale farming. Don Davis' illustration of a Cylindrical Colony imagines what a solar eclipse would look like from space, featuring two columns of land hidden from the sun altogether experiencing and night time. Davis depicts a construction crew piecing together a Bernal Sphere complete with houses, grass and rivers, seemingly unscathed by the vacuum of space. The Cylindrical Colony was never envisaged a solitary structure, instead orbiting with a partner. A Bernal Sphere with tilted arrays to maximize exposure to the sun. An exterior view of a Toroidal colony, featuring a giant tilted mirror providing sunlight to the interior surface of the ring.

At a press conference in Hong Kong in June 2017, Ashurbeyli explained that Asgardia is a project he has been dreaming of since childhood.

"I was interested in doing something unusual that nobody else was doing," Ashurbeyli told CNN. "It was my dream to create an independent country."

That ambition became more concrete after Ashurbeyli gave a speech at a conference on space law at McGill University in Montreal in 2016, where he was inspired by a discussion about the laws governing murder, marriage and divorce in space.

"I thought: 'Why not organize a country?' Not only for lawyers. But for technicians, for engineers, for every human ... because he's currently restricted by the laws of the country he was born in."

Currently space law is adhered to in the form of the Outer Space Treaty, signed by 103 countries including the US and Russia.

Asgardia advocates for the creation of a new legal platform in space.

Becoming a legitimate country

One of Asgardia's most ambitious plans is to gain UN membership.

To achieve this, the UN's Security Council must firstly approve Asgardia's application to be considered a nation, then two-thirds of members of the General Assembly must vote for its admission.

"A state has to have these characteristics: a permanent population; a defined territory, a government, and the capacity to enter into relations with other states. And it must be recognized as a state by other states," Joanne Gabrynowicz, a space law expert and professor at the Beijing Institute of Technology's School of Law, tells CNN.

A rendering shows a spacecraft with Saturn in view.

Ashurbeyli plans for Asgardia to form a democratic government, as well as a Prosecutors Office, National Audit Office and the other governmental bodies.

Governmental departments will be run by Asgardians in the locations they represent, while the administrative center will be in Vienna.

These have not yet been formed. A parliamentary election will come first: Asgardians have until March 29 to submit their applications to become parliamentarians. After the election, governmental bodies will then be formed.

When asked by CNN how Asgardia intends to provide peace to its citizens without a physical settlement, Ashurbeyli says the nation's citizens can take advantage of their "dual citizenship".

"If I have problems on Earth, I'll have my embassy from Asgardia. (It's as if) you are a tourist, you can go to your embassy and they'll try to help you."

Ashurbeyli does, however, recognize the multitude of issues that come with forming his own nation -- let alone one based in space.

"We have to be like a normal country. All countries have problems, and soon we will have the same problems," he says.

"But we will have more than normal countries because we are not on earth."