Moving to a space station? Join Space Coast.

Space Coast Credit Union has positioned itself to go where no financial cooperative has gone before:

Space. The final frontier.

According to promotional material, you can join the Melbourne, Fla., credit union if "you are a member of any expedition to or colony on any celestial body including the moon and planets in this or any other galaxy." It's no joke, said Pain Murray, vice president of marketing for the $497.5 million-asset institution. The Florida regulator actually approved this field-of-membership expansion about two years ago.

"We got that bylaw change when they were proposing space station Freedom," she said. "If a space station develops out there, we want them to join Space Coast since we're located in the Kennedy Space Center.

"Space Coast is very serious about looking toward the future, and not only with our products," she said.

Klingons need not apply, because the bylaw doesn't allow aliens to join, Ms. Murray said.

Michael Crotty, deputy general counsel for litigation for the American Bankers Association, dismissed the expansion as a "weak attempt at humor." The trade group doesn't plan to sue over it.

"When I talked about a community credit union I said you could draw a Circle around the Milky Way and call it a well-defined community," he said. "I didn't know the half of it."

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