Blue Origin, Pinkwashing, Green Concerns: “Chromatic” Paradoxes of Space Tourism

Contemporary space tourism presents a spectrum of contradictions spanning social, environmental, and legal dimensions. This article employs a chromatic metaphor to analyse these tensions through the lens of comparative law: Blue represents the corporate identity of commercial space ventures and geopolitical concerns arising from regulatory vacuums; Pink symbolises the appropriation of feminist imagery to enhance corporate reputation, as exemplified by Blue Origin’s April 2025 all-female mission; Green addresses environmental externalities whose carbon footprint contradicts sustainability claims. Drawing on public and private law perspectives, we examine how the traditional public/private divide—already problematic in terrestrial governance—becomes particularly acute when projected into orbital space. Existing international space law frameworks, developed during the Cold War for governmental actors, remain ill-equipped to regulate billionaire-led corporations. Adopting the framework of negative comparative law, the article contends that the task ahead is not incremental reform but the reconception of legal categories themselves—a shift from a purely international to a genuinely transnational dimension.