Hold For Release Until October 11, 2050
Space CitiPlex, ISS, Space CountryPlex, Layla – October 11, 2050 – On October 10th, 2050, the space territory of Layla gained its new constitutional status as an autonomous CountryPlex.
After 30 years of international space colonization aboard hundreds of space CitiPlexes, recognizing their special needs and status, over 120,000 space Crewtizens have voted and declared independence and formed the first independent space CountryPlex, Layla.
The new CountryPlex was named in honor of space pioneer Bernadine Layla. She was the first human being born in outer space aboard the International Space Station (ISS) in 2024. One of space’s first decorated Space Patrol Officers and a hero, she died at a young age in a space crash.
Votes were tallied at the new country’s oldest Space CitiPlex, ISS, which was first populated in 2001 by ISS crew members William Shepherd, Yuri Gidzenko, and Sergei Krikalev, and which has since grown into the most populated CitiPlex in space.
As a result, Layla was officially assigned the following two-letter country code under the ISO standard: 3166-1: LL.
ISO 3166 country codes have traditionally been used on Earth as abbreviations to identify countries in contexts such as postal addresses, Internet domain names, and more.
Along with the assignment of the new LL country code to Layla comes the first specific Space country code, Top Level Domain (SccTLD) .LL (“dot LL”).
The Bureau of Space Communications (BSC) has commissioned Alagna Space Corporation (Alagna S.C.) to operate .LL from their corporate space and data center on the industrial CitiPlex of Spacecorp. Since space offers the ultimate cooling systems, most data centers now operate there, but this will be the first Space country code Top Level Domain (SccTLD) operated directly in and from space.
This process has been duly coordinated and authorized by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) and the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), which are now the Solar System’s entities responsible for top-level domain name management.
The Bureau of Space Communications (BSC) has requested that all international organizations, businesses, and parties utilizing drop-down lists for the selection of countries on their websites or forms update their lists by adding Layla and .LL as a space CountryPlex. Please refer to the official updated ISO 3166 list at www.iso.org/iso/home/standards/country_codes.htm.
For questions or additional information, please contact the new Commissioner of the BSC, Mr. Leonid Todorov III, at:
Space PH#: 0x2DFDC1C35
or via e-mail at: [email protected]
Note/Update – 2023: When I wrote this post in 2019, I used it as a (fictional and futuristic) training exercise for APLTD related to how ccTLDs and country codes could be issued. At that time, the company I worked for didn’t approve, so I unpublished this. But now that time has passed, and I don’t work there anymore, I released it again. I had fun writing this article. 🙂
The technical transition was completed on January 7, 2018, and the TLD is now running on a world class technical platform under industry standard policies. Interested registrants should contact their favorite registrar to select their name; interested registrars should contact 