Ask Lemmy

Heh. From a legal standpoint, if you burgle the ISS, it sounds like you can manage to get in trouble in an impressive number of jurisdictions.

https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/LSB/LSB10869/2

Congressional Research Service

If You Do the Space Crime, You May Do the Space Time

International Space Station Intergovernmental Agreement

Commercial space flights from the United States have included at least one purely private visit to the International Space Station (ISS), a permanently inhabited research-oriented facility in low Earth orbit cooperatively operated by the United States, Member States of the European Space Agency, Russia, Canada, and Japan. Criminal conduct on the ISS implicates an ISS-specific agreement. Modifying and displacing an earlier agreement, the 1998 ISS Intergovernmental Agreement (IGA) signed by the governments of the cooperating countries provides that, in general, each country retains “jurisdiction and control” over (1) the “flight elements” or areas it provides and registers in accordance with the agreement (for instance, the habitation module provided by the United States); and (2) “personnel in or on the Space Station who are its nationals.” In other words, unless a more specific provision of the IGA applies, each signatory retains jurisdiction over the areas and personnel it has provided to the project.

So it sounds like basically, from a criminal jurisdiction standpoint, the ISS is a bunch of little territories, made up of bus-length modules.

So if you go through the ISS grabbing stuff, you're probably now committing crimes in US territory, territory of European states, Russian territory, Canadian territory and Japanese territory.

Security through inconvenience.

Didn't some of the old russian capsules have a gun as standard to shoot any dangerous wildlife when they landed in Siberia? Not sure if that has continued, probably not a good idea anyway!

Well, yeah. If you wanted to take them out all you'd have to do is launch a rocket and rendezvous with the station at high relative velocity. Even low velocity would be destructive. There is no missile defense for space assets.