Eligos

NewSpace—formerly alt.space; also new space,entrepreneurial space,astropreneurship, and commercial space—are umbrella terms for a movement and philosophy encompassing and somewhat synonymous with, yet ultimately substantially broader than, a highly visible, globally emerging, private spaceflight industry. Specifically, the terms are used to refer to a global sector of relatively new, distinctly commercially-minded, aerospace companies and ventures working to independently (of governments and their prime or major contractors, i.e., Old Space) develop faster, better, and cheaper access to space, space and spaceflight technologies, and overall space missions—again, all largely driven by commercial, as distinct from political or other, motivations. (However, many view the commercial aspects of NewSpace as simply the best means to broader, more socioeconomically-oriented, NewSpace ends; notably, the settlement of Mars and space colonization, generally.) These terms also naturally extend to the worldwide community of designers, refiners, promoters, and advocates of building-block concepts, architectures, systems, technologies, missions, programs, protocols, and policies that enable and support NewSpace activities across all relevant dimensions.

As with any new phenomenon, NewSpace currently defies easy description; its shape-shifting contours are still evolving, in flux, and otherwise not well-settled. As of a 2016 Forbes article, for example, the full definitional-scope of NewSpace remains somewhat elusive:

People may not know exactly what 'NewSpace' is. But they know they are excited about it. [...] [T]he spotlight [is] understandably on low-cost and visionary commercial space technologies. But the concept is more than that.

Likewise, according to a February 2017 Observer Research Foundation article on NewSpace in India:

While there is no internationally accepted technical definition of 'NewSpace', principally, the ethos of the movement has been to challenge the traditional ways of space exploration that are widely considered as too expensive, time-consuming, and lacking in room for inventive risk-taking.

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