Yeah, it's just a more-aggressive synonym for "oldspace". Couldn't say where it came from. The EELV and Ariane were a reasonable approach at the time to make r

Yeah, it's just a more-aggressive synonym for "oldspace". Couldn't say where it came from. The EELV and Ariane were a reasonable approach at the time to make rockets a bit more affordable. Any way to do reusability at the time would have required a novel and exotic architecture, with a matching exotic budget. And that just wasn't in the cards. But now it's not that impossible or expensive to ask a rocket stage to drop out of the sky and sit on its tail. (The hovering rocket is a garage project at this point, though a difficult one--but mostly because of the "rocket" part and not the "hovering" part.) Any existing stage could be modified to do the same with modern avionics, with the addition of an RCS and restartable engine (if it doesn't already have those). Sure, SpaceX's choice of 9 throttlable engines makes it easier, but you can do the "hover-slam" with just one giant one. Any incumbent who can't manage to do so will rightly be done within a decade. And as hide-bound as they all seem to be, that might be most of them. They'll still have to deal with SpaceX's manufacturing efficiency, which might be even harder, as manufacturing inefficiency is part, for example, of Ariane's DNA. But at least they'll stay in the race.