The Stack of Rational Nodal Curves

In this series of three papers we start to investigate the rational Chow ring of the stack consisting of nodal curves of genus 0, in particular we determine completely the rational Chow ring of the substack consisting of curves with at most 3 nodes. In this first paper we construct the stack of rational nodal curves and its stratification by nodes and show that the map from the universal curve to the stack is not representable in the category of schemes.