The Caelus Foundation, a nonprofit who’s mission is to advocate for broad participation in the space domain and to engage and empower people around the world to build a space-centric community through their decisions and actions, has just published a research paper providing an understanding of common terms important for achieving positive benefits from commercial space activities, and in establishing supportive and appropriate regulatory frameworks.
The authors summarize their findings with this conclusion: “This research has revealed that there are significant challenges with communicating the value of space enterprises, given the common terminology used today. This is largely due to the root word for the industry, ‘space,’ being a term that does not naturally convey any specific type of value. Terms such as ‘commercial space’ and ‘newspace’ attempt to compensate for this issue. Yet, as our interviews showed, the lack of clear and universal understanding of these words creates new challenges, while not fully addressing the obstacle of communicating the idea of space as a domain of economic and strategic value.”
On September 19th, Caelus participated in the Sino-US Space Commercialization Perspectives Workshop co-hosted by the Secure World Foundation and the Chinese Society of Astronautics. The purpose of the workshop was to create a dialogue “… to share and understand perspectives from both US and Chinese stakeholders on how space commercialization is happening in both countries, and what can be done to increase transparency between both commercial contexts.” A full debrief is being prepared in partnership with Secure World and will be made available to the public when completed in the near future.
Rob Ronci, Caelus Executive Director and co-author of the research paper appeared on The Space Show November 22 hosted by Dr. David Livingston on which I called in and discussed the above topics with him. You can listen to the show by downloading the recording on the The Space Show website.