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Originally Posted by Donny Brook
Exactly.
No, no, no and no.
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Well, very, very hard to achieve nowadays, but historically it has happened, and spectacularly, for instance with the India Company.
There is a reason if I proposed a new orbital station with a permanent population. You'd have population and a defined territory not already claimed by anyone else. You would obviously rule it. And the really tough issue is recognition, i.e., relations with other states
on a peer-to-peer standing. That would be nigh impossible to achieve with say China or Russia. OTOH, if South Ossetia could buy, cough, achieve Nauru's recognition, then probably a rich space station could, too.
The latter point, IMHO, also replies to Hal's question:
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Originally Posted by Hal
What precisely is it?
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What you describe is power and rule. Those things can actually exist
de facto. At some point, an enormous territory in what is now Canada was theoretically under the British Crown, but the actual power and rule totally rested with the Hudson Bay Company, which had its own people, its own laws, and its own armies, waging war against the French.
But no state recognised the Hudson Bay Company as a state (while Indian rulers did enter peace treaties with the India Company, thereby implicitly recognising it as a peer).
So what really distinguishes sovereignty from power is the recognition of the other sovereigns.
Note that this is not just being card-carrying members of a social club. If you exercised non-recognized power on an islet and some maritime nation disliked that, you were nothing but a pirate or savage ruler. The nation's navy could get rid of you with no complaints coming.
OTOH if several countries should recognize the orbital station as sovereign, it could apply for UN membership, and just that would already make it harder for any state to just send in its space marines. If UN membership is granted, then the orbital station needs to do something truly egregious to provide UN member states with a viable casus belli.