Space: 1889 is a tabletop role-playing game of Victorian-era space-faring, created by Frank Chadwick and originally published by Game Designers' Workshop (GDW) from 1989 to 1990. It was the first roleplaying game to feature space colonization using steam technology in the style of Jules Verne, H. G. Wells, and Arthur Conan Doyle in what would later be called steampunk. The setting of Space: 1889 has not only produced roleplaying games, but board games, books, miniatures and a computer game.

The first published description of Space: 1889 was in the "Feedback" column in the Ares Magazine in 1983, as a proposal for a board wargame.

GDW initially published the game in 1989, cancelling it a year later in 1990, as a commercial failure. Along with the RPG, a Space: 1889 computer game was produced in 1990 by Paragon. On the closures of GDW in 1995, the rights returned to Chadwick, with Heliograph, Inc. acquiring a reprint licence in 2000 and 2001.

In 2010, the Pinnacle Entertainment Group published a Savage Worlds edition of the game called Space 1889: Red Sands.

In February 2013 Chronicle City announced that it was working with the German publisher Uhrwerk Verlag/Clockwork Publishing on a new English edition of Space: 1889, which is based on the German edition from 2011 which uses the Ubiquity ruleset. In December 2014 Uhrwerk Verlag cut their ties with Chronicle City and continued the translation of the new English edition on their own. The PDF of the English Ubiquity core rulebook was released in October 2014, the print edition in November 2015.

In September 2019, after the announcement of bankruptcy by Clockwork Publishing earlier that year, Ulisses North America announced that it had acquired the rights to Space: 1889. Under license in December 2023, Strange Owl Games successfully crowdfunded Space: 1889 After, which is set ten years after 1899 and has two different sets of rules: Dungeons & Dragons 5th edition and a new system called Empyrean.^{[citation needed]}

The game presents an alternate history in which certain discredited Victorian scientific theories were instead found to be true and have led to the existence of new technologies. In the setting, Thomas Edison invented an "ether propeller" that could propel ships through the "luminiferous aether" (the universal medium that permeates space, based on a now outdated scientific theory), and he traveled to Mars in 1870, accompanied by Scottish soldier of fortune Jack Armstrong, where they discovered that the planet was inhabited. By the time of the game's setting in 1889, the great powers have used Edison's invention to extend their colonies and interests to the inner planets of the Solar System. Venus and Mars have been colonized by the United Kingdom, Germany, France, and Russia. Belgium has only colonized Mars and Italy has only colonized Venus whilst Japan and the United States maintain economic and scientific enclaves on Mars. There are no colonies or bases on the Moon. Only the United Kingdom maintains a (scientific) base on Mercury.

The inner planets reflect an evolutionary progression, the planets nearest to the Sun being younger than those farther out. All planets have extraterrestrial life and most bear native sentient species. Mercury is primeval and tide locked and possesses apparently only rudimentary lifeforms. Venus is a vast swamp world dominated by hulking reptiles and lizard men. The Moon is an airless dead world, but with mysteries hidden deep beneath the surface. Mars is an ancient desert planet in decline that is divided into warring decadent city-states clinging to a failing system of canals. Vulcan (named historically more correct Phaeton in Uhrwerk/Clockwork version) has exploded and become the asteroid belt. Limitations in technology cause the outer worlds to remain unreachable and unexplored. There are also hints that some worlds may have terrain hidden beneath their surface.