By James Pethokoukis and Alex MacDonald

The invention of reusable rockets
has reduced the costs to launch satellites to orbit, catalyzing the emerging
space economy. But as we look forward to the exciting future in space, it’s
worth considering the past to get a better sense of how we got here. What’s the
history of government and private investments in space exploration? And what
inspired the pioneers of the 20th century who put man on the Moon? To answer
those questions and more, I’m joined by Alex MacDonald.

Alex is the Chief Economist at NASA and author of “The Long Space Age: The Economic Origins of Space Exploration from Colonial America to the Cold War.”

What follows is a lightly edited transcript of our conversation. You can download the episode here, and don’t forget to subscribe to my podcast on iTunes or Stitcher. Tell your friends, leave a review.

Pethokoukis: The conventional narrative of the history of America in
space begins in 1957 with Sputnik, and that narrative revolves around stuff
Washington did, stuff government did. But in your book, you give a deeper,
longer, richer narrative that, sure, is about what we did in the Cold War and
the space race, but there’s a lot more to American space than that.

MacDonald: There absolutely is.
Depending on how you want to look at it, you can think of the beginning of
space exploration as really beginning with astronomy. Of course, there’s a way
of thinking about that as a method by which we extended our vision into the sky
and were able to explore new worlds. This was certainly what Galileo did when
he noticed that there were craters on the Moon in the 1600s and noticed that
there were moons orbiting the planet Jupiter.

But
you can also think about it as a way of investing in space exploration
technology, because by the time you get to the 19th century, large telescopes
are hundreds of millions of dollars, and in some cases even a billion dollars,
in today’s terms. In the 19th century, the United States was, in fact, the
leading investor in astronomical telescope equipment, but the people who were
making these investments were private individuals. They were James Lick, the
wealthiest man in California in the 1870s. They were Andrew Carnegie, and they
were the foundation that had been funded by John D. Rockefeller in the early
20th century.

This
emerged out of a really strong social movement that actually began in the
mid-19th century. In fact, one of my favorite presidents, John Quincy Adams, is
credited with starting this in some ways, because he used his first inaugural
address to Congress, amazingly enough, to advocate for the need for a federal
observatory. At the time, Congress actually disagreed pretty strongly and did
not appropriate any funds.

But
that didn’t stop John Quincy Adams. He continued to advocate for it privately,
as did a number of private individuals, my favorite one being Ormsby MacKnight Mitchel
(who’s got a classic 19th century American name) who travels around the country
giving lectures, in Cincinnati, in Albany, and there they build large
telescopic observatories using public subscription, voluntary contributions
from the citizens of those cities. They actually built some of the largest
telescopes in the world.

That’s
really the original model, I would argue, of space exploration in the United
States. It actually extends to the early development of liquid-fuel rocketry,
because while Robert Goddard did receive a large portion of his funding for the
first development of the very first liquid-fuel rocket to ever fly in the
1920s, the major funder through his entire career was the Guggenheim family:
again, a private source of wealth that was investing in this activity, at the
time essentially for philanthropic reasons.

When
we think about the current rise of privately funded space activities, which I
think now we’re really quite familiar with in terms of the space developments
of people like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, I’d argue that this isn’t so much a
new phenomenon. This is actually, in many respects, a return to one of the
origins of space flight here in this country.

National pride was a hallmark of the space race and
subsequent space exploration missions. Was that a factor when 19th-century
America was building these observatories? Were we trying to prove ourselves as
a young nation with investments in astronomy?

Absolutely.
In fact, you see that type of national pride in the John Quincy Adams pitch to
Congress for a federal national observatory. He, in fact, would point to all of
the observatories in Europe. At the time, there were dozens of observatories in
Europe, and he made the point to Congress that all other major countries in the
world were contributing to this important science, and here in the United
States at the time we were not.

It
actually comes across even more incredibly and more amazingly in the story of
the Cincinnati Observatory, which was promoted by Ormsby MacKnight Mitchel. He
gives a series of lectures in Cincinnati in the 1840s, and they were very
inspiring. He was a bit of a Carl Sagan of his day, if you will. He ends his
lectures by making a call to the citizens of Cincinnati to fund what he pitches
as being the world’s largest telescope. He argues, literally, that because we
are a republic, there are no kings or queens to fund large telescopes, as was
the case in Europe at the time. He says, “We need to show the czar of
Russia that here in this republican country” — small-R republican — “the
citizens will become the patrons of science, and that we will become the most
successful patrons of science.”

Although
the citizens of Cincinnati do not, in fact, raise enough money to build the
largest telescope in the world, they do actually raise enough money to import
from Germany one of the top refractors. And they have for a significant period
of time the second- or third-largest refractor in the world for use of the
citizens, the members of the Cincinnati Astronomical Society. It’s a really
unique development, and I think a very American one at that. Once again, he
made the appeal on this national pride element, and so I think there really is
this way in which space flight signals not just our personal ambitions, but the
aspirations and the value sets of the nation and communities as a whole.

I find that especially interesting because, and we’ll talk
a bit more about this maybe a little later in our chat, as the private sector
has become involved currently in a way that it wasn’t during Apollo, I think
some people don’t like that. They find it maybe tawdry, like the private sector
is in an area where it shouldn’t be: This is inherently a public good; it’s a
government effort. Yet really the story you’re telling is that from the very
beginning, America and space, it was viewed not as a Washington thing, but a
republic thing, a citizen thing, and even if some of those citizens were fairly
wealthy.

Yeah,
I think that’s really true. I do think one of the things that has changed is
that, in the 19th century, these large astronomical observatories were
essentially non-profit activities. They were monuments, either to communities
or to individuals. I think one of the things that has demonstrably changed is
that now private space flight is, in fact, a way of making money.

When
I started working at NASA in 2008, there was this standard joke that everyone
in the space industry has heard, and I’m sure you have too, which is that if
you want to become a millionaire in the space industry, start as a billionaire.
That joke doesn’t work anymore because increasingly we’re now seeing
individuals who are making an incredible amount of money in the rise of
commercial space activities, and that really is new. All new things go through
a phase where people are not entirely sure what to make of it all, but what
it’s resulting in is an incredible dynamism, where we are now being able to
procure services for things like human space flight, and to even procure
services for delivering cargo to the lunar surface that have the potential to
transform the economics of these activities.

We
are going through an incredible period of dynamism by really marrying up these,
I’d say, three different motives: the signaling motive of the nation-state, the
intrinsic motivation of individuals who want to see an expansion of space
science and of the human space flight experience, and also the profit motive. I
think these things are really combining in a genuinely unique way that we
didn’t actually see in the 19th century or the 20th century, really.

You gave really a fantastic TED Talk about the history of science fiction about the Moon. What I found interesting is that there was a period in the 16th century when people started writing about going to the Moon. What was interesting is that they started writing about it in, at least as best they could, a scientific way. They tried to think of contraptions to get to the Moon. They weren’t relying on magic, or suddenly someone had a dream and they woke up on the Moon. Maybe their contraption was something pulled by geese! Maybe there was a balloon — who knows? But then that stopped. As we learned a little bit more about gravity and vacuum, we stopped writing those kinds of stories, and the stories became more fanciful again.

Then, as you mentioned, during the Industrial Revolution,
we started figuring stuff out. We started figuring out new ways to produce
energy, and we started learning about pressure and pressure chambers and how to
deal with vacuums. We started writing again, as best we could, about scientific
ways of getting to the Moon. Did that reawakening play any kind of influence in
the interest in astronomy and building telescopes in the 19th century?

Yeah,
I think you really summarized that perfectly. In the 1610s, the telescope is
invented, and then in the 1630s, a number of writers emerge who come up with
these narratives and these scientific evaluations of how you might travel into
space. These aren’t really small figures. One of the most well-known ones is
John Wilkins. He’s the founder of the Royal Society in Great Britain at the
time. And there is this flowering of thought on space flight. Then as the
discovery of the vacuum really comes to be understood, people realize that a
condition of vacuum exists between the Earth and the Moon, and there aren’t
really ways of thinking about getting there.

In
the Industrial Revolution, a lot of the technologies that allow you to think
about space flight come online, the most obvious one being pressure vessels,
the other relevant ones being, essentially, large armaments. It’s not a
coincidence that when Jules Verne talks about the technology for traveling to
the Moon in his very well-known book “From the Earth to the Moon,” he essentially
has the protagonists being underemployed armaments makers in the United States
after the Civil War, who had incredible capabilities for developing large
cannons, and they thought they might put them to a different use, a type of
swords-into-plowshares initiative in the United States in the 19th century.

This
results in a real explosion of stories about traveling into space. Jules
Verne’s “From the Earth to the Moon” is written in the 1860s, but also written
in the 1860s is the story “The Brick Moon” by Massachusetts pastor and writer
Edward Everett Hale. He writes the first story about living on a space station.
He and his brother, while they’re students at Harvard, basically come up with a
concept for what today we would call a GPS system. All of these things are in
the culture and in the literature.

Perhaps
the most striking combination of these two themes of science fiction and
astronomy is the story of Percival Lowell. Percival Lowell builds a little
observatory, at which, later in the 20th century, the planet Pluto is
discovered. I should say the dwarf planet Pluto. He is motivated by this idea
of canals on Mars, which had been essentially emerging as a culture topic
because of a mistranslation of Giovanni Schiaparelli’s Italian word canale, by which he meant channels, and
which gets translated into English as canals. But Lowell sees these things, and
he writes these books like “Mars as the Abode of Life.” And all of these
popular culture works that expound the idea of a purported hypothetical Martian
civilization, which, of course, gives further energy to the space flight
movement overall.

That
intertwining of astronomy and space flight ambition really is there in the 19th
century, and of course, it continues up to the present day. The James Webb
Space Telescope, of course, is one of the most exciting projects of our time. I
was fortunate enough to take off some time from work and actually go down to
French Guiana to watch the launch, and it was an amazing moment.

One
of the reasons it’s so amazing is because, depending on how well it works, and
depending on whether we get the star shade out there as well, we may be able to
detect biosignatures around other planets, around other stars. If we do that,
and we find some planets that have biosignatures within a few tens of light
years, that’s going to be an incredible motivation for decades to come for
people to think about designing systems. So the intertwining of astronomy and
space flight continues strong today.

Again, in the book, you give this deeper history, but for
most people, certainly the anchor in their minds is Apollo. It’s the premier
achievement of NASA. It’s one of the premier achievements of the United States
of America. Anybody running for president, their initial campaign video will
refer to the Moon landing. American greatness, all that. And also, obviously, it’s
a civilizational achievement. But was that such an anomaly, such a powerful
example, that that model is kind of unhelpful now as we think about space and
what the model should look like going forward? Are we still too much trapped in
this amazing achievement and we are maybe slow to break out of that model?

What
I would say is not that it’s unhelpful, but that it’s incomplete. I actually still
think it is helpful, because it’s important to remember that the predominant
source of funding for space exploration to this day remains the taxpayer
dollar. It remains governmental appropriations. It’s important to not lose
sight of that because, at a certain level, the taxpayer is the customer, and we
have to ensure that we are still delivering important national programs that
are of genuine national and public value, because that’s the equation that has
allowed us to make the progress we have.

I
actually think there’s a huge lesson to be learned, not just from Apollo, but
from how the space shuttle was agreed to. The Nixon administration, which made
the initial decision on proceeding with the space shuttle, essentially
recognized that now humans were flying in space, and they will be flying in
space regardless of what the United States does, and therefore we’d best be
part of it and we’d best support that capability to ensure that the US and its
citizens continue to be, at that time, essentially, solely in low-Earth orbit.

As
a result, we have created the capabilities over decades that now the private
sector is able to build on and is able to innovate with. The workforce of tens
of thousands of trained aerospace engineers and human space flight engineers
and technicians across the country was the foundation for companies like
SpaceX, who are able to draw upon that in order to now innovate in new ways to,
hopefully, lay a new foundation for a new set of space capabilities.

What
was incomplete, I think, about the solely Apollo model was that it does not
allow for the intrinsic motivations of individuals, and specifically the
intrinsic motivations of highly capitalized individuals, to be able to make
serious progress. I mentioned James Lick as one of the funders of large
telescopes in the 19th century. He was the wealthiest man in California in the
1870s. He’d made all his money in property rights speculation around the California
Gold Rush. He gave 17.5 percent of his entire estate to a single project of
space exploration, which was the Lick Observatory, the really first mountaintop
observatory built, which to this day actually is still operational and finds a
significant number of exoplanets.

So
if the wealthiest man in California today, or let’s expand that and say maybe
the wealthiest man in Austin or the wealthiest man in Seattle, if they spent
17.5 percent of their estate at current market values — folks like Jeff Bezos
and Elon Musk are somewhere in the $150 billion range, so 17.5 percent of their
wealth, a number for which we have a historical precedent of individuals
spending on a single project of space exploration — each of them could fund a
$20 billion project of space exploration. That is a massive potential contribution.
Of course, you could argue, in fact, that they’re making that exact
contribution presently.

The
Apollo model doesn’t allow for that. It doesn’t allow for a more complex
economic ecosystem. Frankly, that’s why we at NASA have really shifted into a
way of thinking about space development as a meta public-private partnership.
There is no such agreement that you can get at NASA called a public-private
partnership. There’s this different set of contractual mechanisms by which we
have been making this transition to a much more vibrant economic ecosystem than
we had enjoyed, let’s say, in the latter part of the 20th century.

I
think Apollo really still is a model. I think the Artemis program really has
been able to coalesce because we have learned the lessons of Apollo and
continue to apply the most relevant parts of that model. At the same time,
we’ve also learned the lessons of the private sector space capability
revolution, if you will, and learned to leverage these new emerging
capabilities to enable us to achieve a sustained return to the Moon for a much
lower cost than we would be able to otherwise.

You’re the chief economist over there at NASA. We’ve been
talking about a revolution in space funding, who the economic players are.
We’ve gone from a big private sector to a government. Now we have more of this
public-private effort going on. So that’s one economic aspect of the story.

The other economic aspect which is pretty darn important
is just how much the whole thing costs to get from here to up there. I think
that decline in costs is an unbelievably underreported story. When we talk about
what’s going on in America — are we innovative? — that seems like it’s a very
big innovation, that it’s much easier, much cheaper to get stuff into orbit.
For a long time, it seemed like those costs were stuck, and then they went down
by a lot. Am I right that it’s pretty important?

Oh,
it’s incredibly important. The scale of change in launch costs, which have
improved by a factor of five or 10, depending on how you want to look at it, has
enabled the type of growth of capability and the growth of companies that we’re
now seeing. But even more important is the transformation in the cost of small
satellite capabilities. The improvement there actually is, arguably, a factor
of 100, relative to the amount that it costs you to build a high-resolution
telescope and put it in low-Earth orbit. Those used to be hundreds of millions
to billions, and today are now in the millions to tens of millions. That’s an
even more transformative change that we’ve been seeing. These two trends
together is what’s resulting in the current explosion of private capital that’s
now moving into the space industry.

Again, you gave this wonderful talk about the impact of culture and innovation. It’s really a symbiotic relationship. As we mentioned, the culture can get people excited about innovation, but the innovation and the science can sometimes change how the culture thinks about these issues. In the last few minutes of that talk, you hit on a topic which is of a lot of interest to me. My concern is that we are not creating the kinds of stories about the future that will inspire people to try to invent that future. We’re not telling them stories about a future they’d really want to live in. Some people will say, “They’re just stories. Why is that important?” But I think you made some great points, and maybe you can reiterate them. Why is it important that we have stories that show us a future worth building?

Yeah,
it’s an issue close to my heart, as obviously it is for you. The stories that
we tell each other obviously plant ideas. They also inspire. But what they can
really sometimes do is give people motivation, and even purpose, for why they
should be undertaking maybe a decade of hard research and labor and risk. They
lay out a potential place that you can get to, a narrative place.

In
many respects, space flight is really one of these most classic examples. For
literally hundreds of years, space flight was only a story that we told each
other about a possible future that we could enjoy. When Jules Verne is writing “From
the Earth to the Moon” in 1865, he is showing a future that could exist, and in
fact, ultimately came to pass. He wrote about three people launching from
Florida on a trip to the moon that took about a week. He tells the story of
Apollo about 100 years before it happens.

The
story that he told directly inspired many of the people who then helped make it
happen. He inspired Robert Goddard in the US, but he also inspired Hermann
Oberth in Germany, who, in turn, inspired von Braun. Jules Verne also directly
inspired Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, who is the father of Russian space flight. The
way in which these stories shape the future is both profound but also
frustratingly imprecise. It’s hard to ever know in the mind of another human
how a particular story influenced them.

We
often think about the way in which a dystopian story might influence folks. A
lot of folks who write dystopian stories or make movies about them suggest that
they’re making these stories to dissuade folks from allowing that future to
come to pass. On the other hand, if you watch enough “Blade Runner,” you think
that it might look kind of cool, and maybe that makes you okay with a “Blade
Runner”-type of dystopian future. We don’t really understand these things quite
well yet. I actually think it’s a huge area of research, to think about how
narratives shape human behavior.

But
we do know enough to know that they really profoundly do. The stories that we
tell ourselves shape our own activities, and that’s really true at a cultural
scale. Thankfully, actually, we’re seeing, I think, a resurgence in
understanding of this. Neil Stephenson was one of the first people to really
highlight this as an important factor: telling positive stories about the
future. I think Kim Stanley Robinson is one of the other ones. I think his most
recent book, “Ministry for the Future,” is really a direct attempt to tell a
story about how we might actually encounter the climate changes that we know
are coming and actually surmount them as a species, as a civilization.

I
think people are starting to see that we need to tell better stories. My hope
is that we tell stories that include a future where humanity travels out into
the cosmos and learns as much from other planets in our solar system as we have
learned from this one.

Alex, thanks for coming on the podcast.

Hey, thanks. It’s been a real pleasure.

James Pethokoukis is the Dewitt Wallace Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, where he writes and edits the AEIdeas blog and hosts a weekly podcast, “Political Economy with James Pethokoukis.” Alex MacDonald is the Chief Economist at NASA and author of “The Long Space Age: The Economic Origins of Space Exploration from Colonial America to the Cold War.”

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