Abstract
Space tourism’s corporate environmental narrative is centred on the environmental benefits of the ‘overview effect’. However, this sits uneasily alongside the widely dispersed environmental costs embedded in its terrestrial supply chains. Drawing on tourism supply chain scholarship and research on spaceflight impacts, this paper proposes a supply chain framework organising space tourism across pre-trip, operational and post-trip stages, together with the infrastructures that sustain them. The analysis shows that environmental externalities extend beyond launches and re-entries, but also emanate from extractive industries, manufacturing, propellant production, infrastructure development, recovery operations and waste management. Corporate invocations of the overview effect tend to foreground environmental empathy while obscuring these distributed material impacts. This reveals a tension between narratives of planetary care and the environmental burdens underpinning space tourism. As the sector expands, this paper raises questions about what thriving together might mean in the context of emerging space tourism