Today and for the near future, the most visible form of NewSpace is and will be the space tourism/personal spaceflight industry.  One reason this will get significant media coverage is because the $100,000 - $200,000 ticket price requires high-income passengers, and a number of these early fliers will be Hollywood and other celebrities.  You just know that People magazine will have a cover story ("Victoria Principal Discovers New Zero-G Hairstyle") that will attract more readers than a Fortune magazine business-oriented cover story.  Imagine the image this creates for NewSpace.  It will certainly feed the attitude held by some that these flights are just another pleasure trip for the wealthy and serve no real or useful purpose, and therefore this industry does not merit the support of NASA or the FAA.  We may not like it, but image matters and perception is reality. 

So how do we change this image? By presenting commercial spaceflight as part of a global intermodal transportation system that will enhance the world's economy.  By describing how existing air, sea, and land transportation infrastructures will become melded with commercial suborbital, and then orbital, transportation.  By explaining that just as many types of business rely on avation to move their products around the world, so it will be when they need to move their products around the world more quickly (suborbital point-to-point flights) and into space.

Seem farfetched?  In this week's issue of Aviation Week & Space Technology you'll find an article that begins with the following: "Six U.S. teams have won contracts to develop concepts and identify technologies for future subsonic and supersonic aircraft to help NASA set its aeronautics research agenda for the next 20 years."  The development of these aircraft and associated technologies, along with the steady maturation of NewSpace suborbital vehicles, will erode the distinction between aviation and space transportation.

Now if we can just ensure that our luggage arrives with us.