Magnitogorsk Lunar Mining Company
The discovery of various rare minerals on the moon was largely a scientific curiosity for years, overshadowed by the Second Space Race to Mars. Then, in 2041, a Russian robotic rover found something which changed the rules of the game. Iridium. This was the third most valuable element on Earth at the time (second to Rhodium and Palladium) due to both its scarcity and the difficulty in extracting it. The discovery of an entire crater rich in Iridium was something which promised rich rewards to whichever country could control that crater.
Unfortunately for Russia, it was only the previous year that it had invoked Article II of the
Outer Space Treaty to prevent the USA from claiming ownership of the area around the Apollo 11 landing site (‘
...outer space, including the Moon and other celestial bodies, is not subject to national appropriation by claim of sovereignty, by means of use or occupation, or by any other means’). The President therefore felt it impossible to claim direct ownership of the crater, fearing international opprobrium.
The solution was to give generous tax breaks to a number of companies, most notably the
Magnitogorsk Iron and Steel Works and the
Ural Mining and Metallurgical Company. These then formed a new company called the
Magnitogorsk Lunar Mining Company (Магнитогорская Лунная Горнорудная Компания,
Magnitogorskaya Lunnaya Gornorudnaya Kompaniya (MLGK)). With the joint backing of its various corporate investors, it launched a series of lunar missions to set up a series of mines in the crater, including many manned missions. The company claimed ownership of the crater directly, thus circumventing the perceived ban on a country owning any part of the moon.
Over the next 10 years, the domes and tunnels of the mines grew to encompass the entire crater, now known simply as
Iridium Crater (Иридиевый кратер). The work was extremely dangerous and the company found it increasingly difficult to find volunteers to go, even with the huge salaries on offer. The solution found was to work with the government. The details of the deal are still unclear, but for the past 10 years, large numbers of convicts have been transported to the MLGK mines, which now exist in a number of craters, all ‘owned’ by MLGK. Officially all these convicts are those serving life for murder and other violent crimes, but it is alleged by various non-Russian organisations, and exiles, that the mines have become a convenient place to send dissidents as well. Some call the MLGK mines the ‘new Siberia’ but the name which has stuck most is ‘
Rusa Penthe,’ a play on the name of the deadly mining planet Rura Penthe from an old sci-fi film ‘
Star Trek the Undiscovered Country.’
It is this use of convicts which makes most international commentators treat the MLGK mines as part of Russia, rather than purely corporate territory, but so far no-one has managed to successfully challenge this in a court.
All MLGK mines use the same flag, which consists of a stylised set of the company initials (in Cyrillic): МЛГК, using mountains and mining equipment, appearing to sit on the edge of the moon, with the black background of the flag symbolising space. At the bottom of each flag are the initials of the specific location. The flag shown below is that of the original Iridium Crater, so has the initials И К.