Legal Comparison as a Tool to Sketch New Rules and Institutions for a Space Society

This article aims to reflect on the role of legal comparison in the (maybe) forthcoming path for the construction of an embryo of space society. Trying to avoid the risk to fall too far away into the field of science-fiction, but also to avoid restating the current and already largely known status of space law, we place ourselves in a time horizon of some decades, without entering into the merits of the various (countless) possible geopolitical scenarios in the background, but generically envisioning a situation in which a few small colonies are permanently populated on the closest celestial bodies of the Solar system, whose populations are still somehow linked to the terrestrial nations of origin. We reflect around a set of dichotomies, not necessarily in terms of opposition and mutual exclusion, rather in terms of their accommodation: public versus private law, individualism versus collectivism, government versus governance, formality versus informality. We conclude by drawing some methodological observations as to why, what, and how to compare in the space field.