THE term ‘NewSpace’ is familiar to everyone involved in the space industry today. It has become shorthand for the entrepreneurial, commercially driven sector that emerged alongside – and sometimes in opposition to – the traditional world of government space agencies and their large aerospace contractors.
SpaceX is NewSpace. Rocket Lab is NewSpace. Start-ups building small satellites, launchers and in-orbit services are routinely described as NewSpace. Countries from Britain and Germany to India and the UAE talk about developing their own NewSpace ecosystems.
But where or how did the compound originate? Accepted history generally takes us to the United States and the Space Frontier Foundation, the campaigning organisation established in 1988 by Rick Tumlinson, Bob Werb and Jim Muncy.
The Foundation emerged from a movement inspired partly by Princeton physicist Gerard O'Neill's vision of permanent human settlement beyond Earth. Its founders believed that the established, government-dominated model of spaceflight was too bureaucratic and expensive and that private enterprise could open the space frontier far more effectively.
Today the Foundation describes NewSpace as representing space infused with the spirit of entrepreneurialism and the free market. Its historical records that in 2004 it was already referring to an emerging generation of space development as NewSpace.
And this is where the story of the word becomes interesting. Who actually coined the term NewSpace?
Unsurprisingly, the Space Frontier Foundation makes a specific claim. Its biography of Bob Werb states that in 2004 he was one of three people who “coined the word NewSpace”, during the strategic review in which the Foundation adopted ‘Advancing NewSpace’ as its mission.
Rick Tumlinson provided a more colourful version of events. The entrepreneurial space movement had experimented with the expression “Alt.Space”, drawing on the language of alternative music and distinguishing its approach from conventional aerospace.
Not everyone liked it. Tumlinson recalls Charles Miller and Bill Boland proposing that “new” and “space” should instead be combined into NewSpace, complete with the internal capital S. It had the sort of typographical punch then appearing in names such as MirCorp and LunaCorp.
Tumlinson says he was initially unconvinced but eventually came around. The name subsequently became attached to the Foundation's conference and, increasingly, to the movement itself.
By 2006, it was certainly established. The Foundation's NewSpace 2006 conference was held at the Flamingo Hotel in Las Vegas that July, bringing together entrepreneurs, investors and space advocates. A contemporary account of the accompanying business plan competition talked about encouraging a new breed of ‘astropreneurs’.
One observer captured the changing times by remarking that a few years earlier many attendees would have had the names of struggling non-profit organisations on their conference badges. Now everyone seemed to be a CEO.
It is a neat snapshot of the moment when commercial space advocacy was turning into a fully-fledged industry.
Except there is a problem with the accepted etymology. NewSpace was already the name of a space magazine in Britain 20 years earlier. And I should know.
The first published issue carries the masthead NewSpace, complete with the capital S and, underneath it: ‘Vol. 1 No. 1 – December 1984’. It was a modest publication, priced at 50p, produced in Lincolnshire by two young space enthusiasts with backgrounds in journalism, printing and publishing – Stephen Byford and me.
Steve worked for a local printer while I was then a contract sub-editor on Angling Times, part of the rapidly expanding EMAP publishing group, whose titles ranged from regional newspapers to national magazines such as Smash Hits.
More intriguing than the NewSpace title, however, is what we said the magazine was actually about. The opening editorial begins: “Welcome to the very first issue of NewSpace, a new publication designed to bring you all the latest news and reports concerning the ever-expanding world of space exploration and commercialisation.”
That final word is important. This wasn't simply an astronomy magazine that happened to have NewSpace as a catchy title. From its first paragraph it identified space commercialisation as part of the changing world it intended to cover.
The editorial noted that NewSpace was aimed at readers wanting to keep abreast of “rapidly changing events in the space world” and that we had established direct contacts in Britain and overseas with people immediately involved in space-related activities.
The first issue included reports on the Space Shuttle, Ariane, Soviet spaceflight and Spacelab. One article also asked a remarkably prescient question: ‘A Space Agency for Britain?’ The UK would eventually establish the UK Space Agency – 26 years later.
Contemporary evidence
Memory alone is a notoriously unreliable historical source. Fortunately, in this case, there is independent evidence as well as an archived set of original issues. The Spalding Guardian (7 December 1984) carried a substantial article headlined: HI-TECH LIFT-OFF FOR SPACE MAGAZINE
“A magazine about space industry and exploration has been launched by two local men,” reporter Paul Murphy wrote, alongside a photo of Stephen and myself in our production office.
The article identified NewSpace, named Stephen Byford and Clive Simpson as its publishers (under the guise of Pitch & Moment Publishing) and reported that the first edition had been printed and released earlier that week. It explained that we believed there was a gap in the market for a magazine covering rapidly changing events in space exploration.
It also recorded something significant about the publication's intended reach. NewSpace had approached the American, European, Russian and Japanese space agencies, together with firms involved in the space industry, for information. NASA, apparently, was particularly helpful – sending news releases “in English!”, as the newspaper article rather charmingly observed.
Copies were being sold on subscription and through a local bookshop and the intention was initially to publish six issues a year. Among the early subscribers was the late Sir Patrick Moore, who sent his subscription cheque accompanied by a typewritten note of encouragement – quite a boost for two young space enthusiasts launching a magazine from Lincolnshire.
The local newspaper article was also picked up by Peterborough-based Hereward Radio, leading to a breakfast-time interview with yours truly. The publicity, however, didn’t go down too well with the EMAP hierarchy and I was subsequently hauled into the Angling Times Editor’s office and asked, in all seriousness, if I was setting up in competition. I did send a ‘message’ via him to the upper echelons of management offering to sell them the forward-looking title and install me as managing editor.
Given what subsequently happened to the space industry, I still like to think they might have regretted turning it down. In retrospect, however, I guess the launch of NewSpace did probably sail rather close to an obscure ‘non-competition’ clause in my EMAP contract.
So, there is little ambiguity about the basic historical fact: a publication called NewSpace, using exactly that compound spelling and capitalisation, existed within the British space community in December 1984. And it explicitly covered space industry, exploration and space commercialisation.
A styling ahead of its time
There was something else slightly ahead of the curve about NewSpace – the way we wrote it.
Running two words together while retaining a capital letter at the start of the second – NewSpace rather than New Space or Newspace – is commonplace today. We see it everywhere in company, product and media names. It eventually acquired various descriptions, including medial capitals, InterCaps and, most familiarly in computing, CamelCase.
But in December 1984, when Steve Byford and I launched NewSpace, it was far less commonplace.
We certainly didn't invent the device. There were some notable earlier examples. CinemaScope had been using its emphatic capital S since 1953, AstroTurf appeared in the 1960s and MasterCard adopted its familiar joined form in 1979.
By the early 1980s, however, the convention was becoming particularly associated with the rapidly expanding computer industry. WordPerfect was in use by 1982 and, when Apple launched the Macintosh in January 1984, two of the programs that helped demonstrate its revolutionary graphical interface were MacPaint and MacWrite. PageMaker would follow in 1985.
So NewSpace appeared at an interesting moment. The medial capital was not new, but it was only just becoming one of the visual signatures of the technological age. Typography references date the wider popularity of so-called InterCaps in logos and brand names particularly to the mid-1980s.
We didn't call it CamelCase, of course. Almost certainly we had never heard the expression because it apparently wasn't coined until the following decade. The earliest documented uses of InterCaps date from around 1990, while CamelCase itself appears in computing circles in the mid-1990s.
I don't remember there being any great typographical theory behind our choice. NewSpace simply looked right: compact, modern and unmistakably two words while simultaneously suggesting that they belonged together.
Looking back more than four decades later, that seems rather appropriate. The magazine's name anticipated terminology that would eventually become ubiquitous across the space industry, while even the way we wrote that name belonged to a visual convention that was only then moving into the mainstream.
We weren't inventing CamelCase in a Lincolnshire newspaper office in 1984. But, like the name NewSpace itself, we seem to have arrived there rather early.
Did we categorically invent the term? That's where some caution is required. It would be tempting – particularly for a journalist unexpectedly finding himself part of the story four decades later – to declare that NewSpace was invented by a startup Lincolnshire publishing venture in the UK rather than in the mighty American entrepreneurial space movement.
As far as I can tell there is no evidence that the Space Frontier Foundation encountered our magazine. If it didn't, the likely explanation is independent coinage.
NewSpace in the United States of the early 2000s quickly became something more specific, almost an ideological declaration of independence from the ‘Old Space’ of government-directed programmes, traditional aerospace giants, cost-plus contracts and lengthy development cycles.
The Foundation sought an industry driven by entrepreneurs, private investment, competition and free enterprise. Its current mission still talks about unleashing the power of free enterprise to open the space frontier.
Today’s meaning of NewSpace undoubtedly owes much to the American movement but the word itself demonstrably predates it.
From insurgency to establishment
There is another irony in all this. The NewSpace companies that challenged the old aerospace establishment have increasingly become part of the ‘establishment’ themselves.
SpaceX, founded in 2002, is an obvious example. The company that once represented the disruptive outsider is now one of the world's dominant launch providers and a crucial contractor to NASA and the US Government.
Meanwhile, established aerospace companies have adopted NewSpace practices and governments have deliberately created commercial markets through procurement and investment.
The dividing line between Old Space and NewSpace has consequently become increasingly difficult to draw. Tumlinson himself has suggested that NewSpace is now beginning to blur into simply ‘space’ – something he regards as a sign of success.
Perhaps that's inevitable. Every revolution eventually has to confront the problem of becoming the establishment. And every generation likes to believe that it invented the future.
There is perhaps a certain retrospective irony in the fact that NewSpace itself was a shoestring start-up, created outside the established publishing industry to report on a space sector its enterprising creators believed was beginning to change.
Unexpected footnote
Which brings us back to a file containing some pristine copies of a small black and white magazine produced in Lincolnshire more than 40 years ago.
When Stephen Byford and I sat down in 1984 and put the words NewSpace across the top of our first issue – making up the magazine by hand from printed galleys produced on a Commodore 64 computer – I don't remember imagining that the same word would eventually become one of the defining labels of the 21st century global space industry.
At its simplest we were combining the words ‘news’ and ‘space’, which seemed an appropriate name for a magazine reporting space news. There was no grand theory behind it. Though we recognised the important role commercial space would play in the future, we certainly weren't launching a movement, at least not in the conventional sense. We were two space enthusiasts with enough experience of journalism and publishing to think we could make a magazine of it.
All these years later, the words in that first editorial now have an oddly prophetic ring: a rapidly changing space world, new technology, international activity and the growing role of commercial space activities in our everyday lives.
