Space Policy Edition: The Long Space Age with Alex MacDonald

**Casey Dreier** (0:19)
Hello, and welcome to the Space Policy Edition of Planetary Radio. I'm Casey Dreier, the Chief of Space Policy here at The Planetary Society, welcoming you to another episode that explores the policies and processes behind space exploration. I just got back from the launch of the Roman Space Telescope. I think I got a cold and it has been a busy month. So this month, we are rerunning one of my favorite interviews, which I think is actually quite relevant in the intervening years since I first recorded it all the way back in 2017
My guest is Alex MacDonald. He was at the time the chief economist at NASA. That position no longer exists after restructuring last year. But we were talking about his book, The Long Space Age, which if you haven't read it, I strongly recommend you do. I think it's actually one of the most important and contextual pieces of information about how the private era of space exploration, if you can call it that, from ground-based observatories in the United States developed before government intervention in fundamental research and exploration in the US. Privately funded observatory building, crowdfunding observatory building in some cases, contrasted against the royal observatories and state-funded activities in Europe and elsewhere. This is a fascinating look at to the extent to which some very wealthy individuals spent the equivalent of billions of dollars building out capabilities and tools to explore space and, notably, rarely funded the ongoing scientific work in them once the hardware itself was built.
We are in a situation now where NASA science, of course, is facing cuts of nearly 50% again, and NASA and others in the White House are casting about looking for private funders. Philanthropy to help fill in the difference. We've seen Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of Google, come forward and actually serve as one of the first very serious funders of a potential space telescope. We've seen others attempt to do that unsuccessfully. So we will see how much the private sector through philanthropy can come in. And I think we have the lessons of history to say we should be welcoming of any additional activities, but they certainly probably won't replace at a fundamental level investment from the public sector, from what NASA does, in a sense, I think, the unique thing that NASA does. So until I recover next month, please enjoy this discussion with Alex MacDonald on The Long Space Age.
Alex MacDonald, thank you for joining me on the Space Policy Edition of Planetary Radio.

**Alex MacDonald** (3:18)
Thanks, Casey. It's really great to be here.

**Casey Dreier** (3:19)
So the classic story about the US role in space exploration is that after Sputnik was launched in 1957, this kicked off this era of government investment in space exploration. We went through the Apollo program, government exploration pulled back, and then we did the shuttle. We brought humans back to low Earth orbit and science trucked along within this constraints. But now we have this brand new era of private investment coming into space flight. We have billionaires like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos dumping their own personal money into space exploration.
And now we have this glorious or exciting new future ahead of us. Tell me why that classic narrative is wrong.

**Alex MacDonald** (4:01)
Well, yeah, I think it's not so much wrong as it is incomplete. What really started me on trying to investigate the economic history of space exploration was in 2004, I was a grad student in economics, and I watched the Spaceship One flight that won the initial Ansari X Prize. And as an economist, I got thinking, what just happened here? Did a bunch of guys just build a spacecraft in the garage? Of course, it turned out it's not quite that simple. It was one of the leading aerospace engineers in the US, Bert Rutan, who'd built the vehicle.
And of course, it wasn't really funded in the garage. It was funded by Paul Allen at about $30 million.
But it led me to think, how long have individuals been funding space exploration essentially out of their own pocket? That led to looking at all the different private sector projects I could find that were economically significant in the history of space exploration. And the ones that you come across that are the most economically significant are actually, at this time, not really these current ones that we're seeing, although they're very exciting as well. They're actually large astronomical observatories in the late 19th century, which were funded by, in many respects, the kind of Elon Musk's and Jeff Bezos' of their days, Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller. And they were funding, in many cases, billion dollar observatories or billion dollar equivalents if you convert the costs to modern day dollar terms. And so that really, for me at least, puts into a different context what we're seeing today. It's not that we're seeing a new phenomenon emerging with these private sector actors, but we're actually seeing the reemergence of a trend that long predated NASA and was actually the original economic force, if you will, for American space exploration.