Planetary Radio: Space Policy Edition
Sep 4, 2026 · 1 hr 8 min · 10 segments
Alex MacDonald, former Chief Economist at NASA and author of "The Long Space Age," joins Casey Dreier to explore more than two centuries of privately funded space exploration in America.
Alex MacDonaldGuest
Casey DreierHost
Alex MacDonald, thank you for joining me on the Space Policy Edition of Planetary Radio.
So the classic story about the U.S. role in space exploration is that after Sputnik was launched in 1957, this kicked off this era of government investment in space exploration.
We kind of brought humans back to low Earth orbit, and science kind of trucked along within these constraints.
But now we have this brand new era of private investment coming into spaceflight.
We have billionaires like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos dumping their own personal money into space exploration.
What really started me on trying to investigate the economic history of space exploration? 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 their garage? Of course, it turned out it's not quite that simple.
It was one of the leading aerospace engineers in the U.S., Bert Rutan, who'd built the vehicle.
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's 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.
or even if you'd like the late 18th century in the United States, what kind of context was there in terms of an economic context and a political context for support for what was considered space exploration at the time, which was, you know, collecting photons coming from the universe? Was there an established role of government for scientific observation of the universe in the United States at this period?
Alex MacDonald, thank you for joining me on the Space Policy Edition of Planetary Radio.
So the classic story about the U.S. role in space exploration is that after Sputnik was launched in 1957, this kicked off this era of government investment in space exploration.
We kind of brought humans back to low Earth orbit, and science kind of trucked along within these constraints.
But now we have this brand new era of private investment coming into spaceflight.
We have billionaires like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos dumping their own personal money into space exploration.
What really started me on trying to investigate the economic history of space exploration? 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 their garage? Of course, it turned out it's not quite that simple.
It was one of the leading aerospace engineers in the U.S., Bert Rutan, who'd built the vehicle.
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's 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.
or even if you'd like the late 18th century in the United States, what kind of context was there in terms of an economic context and a political context for support for what was considered space exploration at the time, which was, you know, collecting photons coming from the universe? Was there an established role of government for scientific observation of the universe in the United States at this period?
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