select data up to a space?

You can use a combiation of LEFT and CHARINDEX to find the index of the first space, and then grab everything to the left of that.

 SELECT LEFT(YourColumn, charindex(' ', YourColumn) - 1) 

And in case any of your columns don't have a space in them:

SELECT LEFT(YourColumn, CASE WHEN charindex(' ', YourColumn) = 0 THEN 
    LEN(YourColumn) ELSE charindex(' ', YourColumn) - 1 END)

select left(col, charindex(' ', col) - 1)

An alternative if you sometimes do not have spaces do not want to use the CASE statement

select REVERSE(RIGHT(REVERSE(YourColumn), LEN(YourColumn) - CHARINDEX(' ', REVERSE(YourColumn))))

This works in SQL Server, and according to my searching MySQL has the same functions

If the first column is always the same size (including the spaces), then you can just take those characters (via LEFT) and clean up the spaces (with RTRIM):

SELECT RTRIM(LEFT(YourColumn, YourColumnSize))

Alternatively, you can extract the second (or third, etc.) column (using SUBSTRING):

SELECT RTRIM(SUBSTRING(YourColumn, PreviousColumnSizes, YourColumnSize))

One benefit of this approach (especially if YourColumn is the result of a computation) is that YourColumn is only specified once.