NewSpace

NewSpace—formerly alt.space; also "new space,"entrepreneurial space, 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. For convenience, and for now, NewSpace tends to be thought of and talked about in juxtaposition to Old Space; that is, NewSpace is what Old Space is not.

Culturally, NewSpace denizens tend to think of themselves as exciting and inventive dreamers, while considering their Old Space counterparts to be, in stark contrast, hidebound bureaucrats. However, the psychographic distance between Old Space and NewSpace may be somewhat narrower than that; complicated by, for example, the fact that Wernher von Braun, the NASA engineer and chief architect behind the Saturn V and Apollo moon landing—thus a veritable icon of Old Space—was known as a consummate dreamer, as the title of Michael J. Neufeld's biography "Von Braun: Dreamer of Space, Engineer of War" makes plain. "As a youth he [von Braun] became enamored with the possibilities of space exploration by reading the science fiction of Jules Verne and H.G. Wells...." Von Braun's later friendship with Walt Disney, a fellow American visionary and kindred spirit who conspicuously embraced fantasy and science fiction as creative forces and fairly embodied the concept and philosophy of Imagineering, also buttresses this contention. Moreover, von Braun was one of the first to chart a serious plan for reaching and settling Mars (as described in his 1952 book "The Mars Project"), a space mission that has come to virtually define the NewSpace generation.

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Wikipedia