No, Forbes magazine hasn't published new ratings yet, where local oligarchs would press Bill Gates a bit. But enterprising Ukrainians have owned the whole outer space outside the Milky Way, our native galaxy.

As you know, in 1980 American Dennis Hope declared himself the owner of all planets in our Solar system but the Earth. This property is evaluated in volume of about 800 trillion US dollars.

Today, thanks to Hope's Lunar Embassy, about 3.5 million people in the world own ground areas on Moon, Mars, Venus and Mercury. There are many pop stars, politicians and even NASA employees among them.

Besides, naming stars after one's people or friends is in fashion lately. Lots of companies provide service of the kind, permanently blaming each other in not having appropriate rights and authorities.

Newly fledged owners of the Universe claim to have acquired ownership right for space in strict correspondence with current (international) legislation, UNO, Russian, Chinese US and Ukrainian governments being aware thereof.

Would you like to know what incognito space owners have appropriated?

No problem!

Visible part of the Universe includes at least 100 billion galaxies, each of them can number from several billions to a few trillions stars and planets (2).

One can only imagine the total value of all these, but surely billions of times more than Hope's space property.

Since December 2006 our Universe has been sold out ? space business is detailed on http://www.universe-resources.com (1). Sold are the whole galaxies for Euro 119 apiece, i.e. the single star or planet costs less than a cent.

Together with certificate of ownership the owner acquires the right to name his galaxy and enter it to the registry available in Internet.

A real go of Ukrainians is the registry information about purchased galaxies is entered into ? it is kept online and available for everybody. In any moment you can go to the required page and proudly show your friends the fact of owning immovable property in the Universe. The same page has links to available scientific information about the galaxy and its photos.

Neither Lunar Embassy, nor star ?traders? provide anything of the kind.

Today (to be considered by science-fiction writers!) there are such galaxies as Atomic Tatyana. It would be pretty curious to take a look at the one the galaxy was named after?

But what are real prospects of space property?

Those ?owning? nominal stars have no prospects at all, but the name of the star. Because ownership right is not the case here.

Putting money into some ground area on the Moon or neighboring galaxy may have sense. Because ownership right IS the case here, it is its value that must increase as the outer space is colonized.

According to Stephen Hawking, one of the leading cosmologists (3), humans have to inhabit outer space to survive.

You see, regular asteroid attacks may put bring down not only the world of dinosaurs, as it happened about 65 million years ago, but modern human civilization as well. Besides, there is danger of super infection, disastrous climate change or solar blast. Unfortunately, possibility of nuclear conflict is not the zero point.

Surely, coincidence of such a great number of factors, which formed conditions for appearance and prosperity of life on our planet, is highly unlikely. Except our mother Earth, modern science knows no more than a few hundreds of so called exotic planets located outside the Solar system, and none with similar conditions.

But, objectively evaluating exponential (accelerating) development of Earth civilization and science, one can assume that the outer space will be explored in two main directions simultaneously.

The first one is colonizing or even earthing the nearest planets, satellites and big asteroids.

No, the Moon and Mars have no natural conditions suitable for living, but they are located in two steps from us in terms of space instead. Thus, their exploration suggests either construction of structures with artificial climate inside, or creation of handmade earth-like on above the surface. Even if it demands supply of a huge amount of required chemical elements (hydrogen, oxygen, carbonic acid gas etc.), and first and foremost ? creation of artificial magnetic field preventing blowing off the artificial atmosphere into outer space, i.e. colossal energy expenditure.

The second direction of human expansion into outer space is the search for and colonization of planets with natural conditions similar to earthly ones. Surely, there are planets where we could live ?without space suit?, but distance to them is unimaginable. Such space expansion requires moving through space with supraluminal speed. This possibility is not denied either by Einstein followers, who suggest presence of so called space/time worm holes, or those scientists, who insist that light velocity is far from being limit.

Prices for ground areas on the Moon are not being reduced, and owners of the Universe are sure that space property will increase in its value as science and technology develops.

For a while prices for space property are comparable with prices for jeans or cheap cell phone.