"By" will mean "before", UTC time. Apologies for not clarifying that sooner. Hopefully given the close date this is not a big surprise.

How would you categorize a nation testing a weapon and destroying a defunct satellite from an operator within their jurisdiction?

@spider based on whether they had the consent of the owner.

Is that what you mean by "jurisdiction", or something else? I don't believe there are any location based jurisdictions, if I'm wrong about that please let me know.

@EvanDaniel I was wondering as to the case if the operator was within the jurisdiction of the nation, not the satellite itself.

@spider is there a reason the language in the market is unclear there? My expectation would be that it would be fairly clear based on reporting whether the operator (and owner, if different) consented.

@EvanDaniel I'm not entirely sure what they are asking but I think there is some attempt at development of criteria along the lines of:

Defunct satellite of X entity is no longer under any control and there is broad consensus that "removing" it would be good for everyone, but X entity either no longer exists or otherwise does not give consent for destruction. Y country decides to take action, and successfully hits it, without direct consent of the other party.

I think there might be some wiggle room in there between "both sides consent" and "direct attack of someone else's property". From the description it seems like anything other than direct consent would count toward a Yes, but that's just my guess.

@Eliza precisely this.

I'd be surprised if there existed a satellite where there wasn't a relatively clear entity to ask about it.

If someone finds such a satellite and shoots it, I expect that would count as a "test".

broad consensus that "removing" it would be good for everyone

I would be shocked by a scenario where blowing up a satellite improved things; that's just not how space debris works. There's no prior examples even in cases of large space debris that will re-enter uncontrolled.

(I know those statements don't provide an answer, I'm just pointing out that I think they're extremely unlikely to be relevant.)

Would "consent of all legal owner / operators" be a good way to interpret this? So if there are no such entities, that part of the question isn't relevant?

Does it need to be successful or only an attempt?

@Eliza successful. Thank you; I'll clarify.

See here for some of my reasoning on that:

https://www.metaculus.com/questions/10023/successful-asat-attack-against-adversary/