Old Space, New Space: A Commercial Revolution in Innovation?
The paper examines the transition from Old Space to New Space, highlighting the role of private enterprises like SpaceX and Blue Origin in driving innovation. It finds that the most significant surge in space innovation occurred in the 1990s, with incumbents still leading in patenting. The study suggests that New Space is more interconnected with Old Space than previously thought, emphasizing the importance of government in creating market opportunities.
- ▪The emergence of firms like SpaceX and Blue Origin marks a significant shift in space innovation.
- ▪The largest surge in space innovation occurred in the 1990s, driven by market demand.
- ▪Incumbent aerospace firms continue to dominate space-related patenting, while new entrants contribute a smaller share.
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Story provenance
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Record
| Original publisher | NBER |
| Canonical URL | https://www.nber.org/papers/w35212 |
| Publication time | Wed, 20 May 2026 02:34:20 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-05-20T03:04:59.039Z |
| Last seen | 2026-05-20T03:04:59.039Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | 0hB5AdrHQ4E7 |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Home Research Working Papers Old Space, New Space: A Commercial… Old Space, New Space: A Commercial Revolution in Innovation? Ruben Gaetani & Alexander T. Whalley Share X LinkedIn Facebook Bluesky Threads Email Link Working Paper 35212 DOI 10.3386/w35212 Issue Date May 2026 The emergence of firms like SpaceX and Blue Origin has made space a leading example of how private enterprise drives innovation, marking what many see as a sharp break between Old Space and New Space. Yet little systematic evidence documents when the transition to this new phase of space innovation occurred and which firms drove it.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at NBER.