I wonder if the 3rd Amendment would prevent nationalization of US space stations.
Re:Crew Dragon Docks with ISS
by yellowapple on Sunday May 31, 2020 @08:44PM
(#23374514)
I guess it depends on who owns it, and whether or not it counts as a private home (and to be clear, nationalization in and of itself wouldn't run afoul of it, since the amendment is limited in scope to quartering of troops in a private residence without the actual residents' consent). It'd get even fuzzier if different people "own" different modules (so the military could perhaps occupy some shared corridors, but if people have attached their own modules as homes, then those would be off-limits for quartering).
Realistically, maritime law might be a better reference, given that space stations and other spaceships are informally (if not formally) referred to as "ships".
But yeah, this is definitely a reason why I hope we can keep the ISS going and just keep building on it. Additional space stations should be for good reason (for example: orbiting the moon, or - my crazy dream scenario - one orbiting in the past-GEO graveyard orbit to collect and refurbish dead satellites).
That means we should allow China to participate in the ISS, too. There are some national security concerns, apparently, but we overcame those with the USSR/Russia, and China should be no different.