In short
Alex McDonald, NASA’s first chief economist, explains why NASA created the role and how NASA uses economic analysis to guide strategy, procurement, and partnerships with private space firms.
Guest backgrounds
Alex McDonald is a senior associate at CSIS’s Aerospace Security Project. He joined NASA in 2008 (Ames Research Center) and helped build economic analysis around venture capital and commercial space development. He studied space economics at UBC, wrote The Long Space Age, and previously worked with investors/startups in Silicon Valley.
Key claims
The chief economist is an independent technical advisor to NASA’s administrator (not a program implementer). NASA can’t treat space spending like private ROI; it instead publishes economic impact reports. NASA’s ambitions have risen while budgets stayed inflation-flat, driving reliance on commercial capabilities. “Spinoffs” are better understood as foundational technologies (e.g., semiconductors), not just consumer trinkets.
Notable examples
Apollo-era rockets driving ~75% of global semiconductor demand; Apollo guidance computers; SpaceX cargo to the ISS enabling Starlink; Artemis II flyby and planned Artemis lunar landings with SpaceX/Blue Origin; orbital data centers and space elevators (skeptical due to carbon nanotube length requirements).
Written by AI. May contain mistakes. Listen to the episode to check what was said.
Chapters
Tap a time to open that second in VOSurprising Roles in NASA
2:31 to 3:38
Discussion on the fascinating role of NASA's chief economist and its implications.
“Joe, have you ever met anyone at a party and you start, you know, you ask them the standard question, what it is that they actually do?”
The Intersection of Public and Private Investment
3:38 to 4:53
Exploration of the relationship between NASA and private sector investments.
“I mean, no, I definitely would have never heard of that before.”
The Role of a Chief Economist at NASA
4:53 to 8:01
Alex McDonald explains his responsibilities and the importance of economic analysis in NASA.
“We've done tons of industrial policy episodes at this point and what the benefits are of government investment versus, again, private capital.”
Personal Journey to NASA's Chief Economist
8:01 to 9:35
Alex shares his background and how he became NASA's first chief economist.
“And when you look at that, one will find some very interesting parallels.”
History of U.S. Space Funding
9:35 to 14:00
Exploration of the transition from private funding to government-funded space exploration.
“These days, there's such a growth in venture capital and private equity investment in space that actually it's a bit of a booming field, to be honest.”
Shuttle to Starship: The Evolution of Spaceflight
14:00 to 17:08
Learn how the transition from the space shuttle to modern spacecraft reflects economic decisions and safety concerns.
“Like, why aren't we still launching shuttles and so forth?”
NASA's Budget History and Ambitions
19:39 to 23:09
Understand NASA's budget history and how it aligns with their ambitious goals for space exploration.
“In the mid 60s, over 5 % of the entire federal government budget, at least according to this chart that I pulled up on Reddit just now.”
The Economic Impact of Space Programs
23:10 to 28:00
Explore the economic returns from space programs and their implications for future investments.
“And of course, NASA also does robotic missions out to the outer planets.”
The Economic Truth of Space Exploration
28:00 to 29:27
Explore the economic implications of NASA's Artemis program and international collaboration in space.
“So there's a real kind of economic truth to that whole Kennedy statement of we do these things not because they're easy, because they're hard.”
The Emerging Lunar Economy
29:27 to 31:14
Discuss the future of the lunar economy and the development of private space stations.
“economy, and this refers more to commercial space stations.”
Show all 19 chapters
Potential of Orbital Data Centers
31:14 to 33:13
Examine the feasibility and profitability of data centers in space.
“So that one, I think, is easier to understand.”
The Plausibility of Space Elevators
33:13 to 35:03
Delve into the theoretical concepts and technological hurdles of space elevators.
“and what kind of, what essentially what reflectivity they have.”
Evaluating Space Technologies at NASA
38:01 to 42:00
Understand how NASA evaluates technologies and project feasibility for space missions.
“You know, you're obviously focused on the economics of particular projects, but I imagine the technology matters as well.”
Exploring Lunar Landing Architecture
42:00 to 43:34
Learn about NASA's current lunar landing plans and the complexities involved.
“And the agency suggested actually that if both landers are ready, the Blue Origin and the SpaceX lander, maybe a low-Earth orbit Orion might dock with both of them.”
The Quest for Mars Colonization
43:34 to 45:28
Discuss the viability and challenges of colonizing Mars as per Elon Musk's vision.
“We've got approximately, you know, 1 billion years, give or take, until this planet becomes uninhabitable, right?”
Public vs. Private Space Initiatives
45:28 to 47:20
Analyze the roles of public funding compared to private capital in space missions.
“of really like, which is this argument that goes back to Arthur C.”
International Space Law: Ownership and Rights
47:20 to 51:22
Understand the implications of the Outer Space Treaty on lunar territory claims.
“We've actually seen multiple different private missions that have been paid for.”
Humorous Speculations on Alien Invasions
51:22 to 51:56
A light-hearted take on economic considerations during an alien invasion.
“Is this not like a thought experiment that they assign to all NASA economists?”
Podcast Story Introduction
57:46 to 58:17
Introduction to the main story about NASA hiring a chief economist.
Transcript
Automatic transcript. May contain errors.0:00Tracy Alloway:Running a business means dealing with a lot of overly complicated software, and most CRMs tend to follow the same pattern. They're packed with endless features you'll never use, interfaces that feel clunky, and teams end up spending way too much time just trying to find basic information. Today's sponsor, Pipedrive, is a simple CRM tool designed for small and medium businesses. Pipedrive brings you entire sales processes into one dashboard, giving you a crystal clear, complete view of sales processes and customer information designed to help teams stay in control and close more deals faster. It all centers around the visual sales pipeline, where you can see every deal, what stage it's in, and what needs to happen next.
0:35Tracy Alloway:Since everything is in one platform, PipeDrive is designed to unite your team, keep track of sales tasks, and stay on top of your leads. Switch to a CRM built by salespeople, for salespeople, and join the over 100 ,000 companies already using PipeDrive. Right now, you'll get a 30-day free trial. No credit card or payment needed. Just head to pipedrive.com slash simpleCRM to get started. That's pipedrive.com slash simpleCRM. The thing about AI for business, it may not automatically fit the way your business works. At IBM, we've seen this firsthand. But by embedding AI across HR, IT, and procurement processes, we've reduced costs by millions, slash repetitive tasks, and freed thousands of hours for strategic work.
1:20Tracy Alloway:Now we're helping companies get smarter by putting AI where it actually pays off, deep in the work that moves the business. Let's create smarter business, IBM. Small businesses are the pulse of every community. They bring people together, create opportunities and drive growth. Chase for Business helps business owners like you with personalized guidance and convenient digital tools all in one place. With that guidance and your determination, you can take your business farther and help build a brighter future for your community. Learn more at chase.com slash business. Chase for Business. Make more of what's yours.
1:55The Chase Mobile app is available for select mobile devices. Message and data rates may apply. JPMorgan Chase Bank, N.A. Member FDIC. Copyright 2026. JPMorgan Chase and Company.
2:09Bloomberg Audio Studios. Podcasts. Radio. News.
2:25Hello and welcome to another episode of the Oddbots podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway.
2:29Tracy Alloway:And I'm Joe Weisenthal. Joe, have you ever met anyone at a party and you start, you know, you ask them the standard question, what it is that they actually do? Yeah. And you just get a response that kind of blows your mind. It's something that you've never even thought of before. First of all, can I say my favorite question at parties is what do you do? I've heard that. I know some people look down on it. But I find it fascinating. Oh, ask me about my hopes and dreams. I don't care. I don't care. I don't care. I want to know what you do. No, I do. Like, oh, where do you live? Whatever. I want to know what you do.
3:03Tracy Alloway:I mean, look, in some instances, maybe people don't want to talk about it, but I figure people devote a big chunk of their lives to work. That's a pretty good icebreaker. So we need to renormalize that. Absolutely. And as podcast hosts, we're always looking for interesting people. That's right. And sometimes you meet them at parties. This person that we're going to be speaking to, we actually met at our party, our 10-year anniversary party. Someone else brought them. And I was introduced to him and I said, what is it that you actually do? And the answer that came back was I was NASA's first chief economist.
3:37Tracy Alloway:Amazing. Sold. Have you ever heard of that before? I would have not. I mean, no, I definitely would have never heard of that before. I mean, I guess I'm not surprised in some sense. I'll say the one sense that I'm not surprised that NASA had a chief economist, which is like economists seem to sort of be in every organization these days. They have a lot of tools in their toolkit that can be applied to a lot of things. They're pretty good with statistical analysis, et cetera. But then also, you know. But this is stats in space. Well, then the other thing is, you know, I know that there's growing interest in the commercial applications in space.
4:10Tracy Alloway:And so satellites are another one area. Obviously, defense. People talk about asteroid mining. I don't know if I'll ever see that in our lifetimes, but I know that that's a thing people are interested in. So although I would not have necessarily thought it, you know, I guess I'm not totally surprised that NASA is like, all right, let's bring an economist in. Well, I was pretty surprised. I guess I'd never thought about it in detail before. But it turns out that not only does this role exist, but it sits at the sort of intersection of, I guess, a lot of public and private investment in space. exploration.
4:43And we've talked about this before, this idea that NASA has perhaps been seeding a lot of territory in many ways to private capital, SpaceX especially. We've done tons of industrial policy episodes at this point and what the benefits are of government investment versus, again, private capital. And so I'm very excited to talk space economics. Let's do it. Truly the perfect guest. We're going to be speaking with Alex McDonald. He served as NASA's first chief economist, as I said, and he is now a senior associate at the Aerospace Security Project at CSIS, the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
5:21Alex, thank you so much for coming on All Thoughts. Thank you so much. It's a pleasure to be here. Thanks for coming to our party. Yeah, that too. Good party. I enjoyed it. Thank you. Awesome. Excellent. So obvious question first, I suppose. What does a chief economist at NASA actually do? So the position of chief economist is essentially one of the kind of three independent technical advisors to the administrator. I'll point out that all three of those positions were basically cancelled at the beginning of this Trump administration, but they had been essentially people who'd be brought into the agency to advise the administrator on technical issues related to economics, chief economist, technology, chief technologist, and science, chief scientist.
6:02These are not positions that are responsible for implementing programs. They are essentially independent technical advisors to the head of NASA. NASA is a$25 billion agency. It has 10 different centers across the US. It has international partnerships. And of course, it has an extensive amount of contract for the private sector. And so the role of the chief economist is essentially to advise the administrator of NASA on whatever the administrator of NASA needs advice on. But it tends to be related to what are the markets that we're seeing? What level of investment can we expect in a given sector?
6:37Has this company actually raised money or are they perhaps maybe a misrepresented? These are all questions that come up in procurement and in strategy. I started at NASA in 2008. So that was when the space shuttle was still flying. We were beginning to think about partnering with the private sector. SpaceX had received its first essentially contract from NASA, but it had not launched anything to space yet. So as you can imagine, over the last 15 plus years, the role of the private sector has become very significant within NASA's portfolio. And as a result, economic analysis became one of the types of internal services that essentially the senior leadership at NASA decided they needed.
7:20Tracy Alloway:That was fantastic. Just real quickly, backing up even further, how did, why you in that role? What were you doing prior to that role such that you got brought in for this? So for me, space economics was a real passion. I remember very distinctly 2005 when I was a master's degree student in economics up at the University of British Columbia in Canada. And I remember two things that happened that year. One was the flight of Spaceship One. This was the first privately funded, privately built spacecraft to take humans above the von Karmen line, above 100 kilometers, which is the kind of international definition of where space starts.
7:57And I remember as an economist kind of saying, that's unusual. How long have we been building our own spacecraft and doing that with private money? That started my PhD into the long-run economic history of space exploration that became my first book called The Long Space Age, essentially on the economic history of where the money came from for astronomical observatories. And when you look at that, one will find some very interesting parallels. For example, the people who built the largest telescopes in the early 20th century, these are the Mount Wilson and Mount Palomar observatories. They were funded by Andrew Carnegie and John D.
8:30Rockefeller, the two richest people in America at the time. Sound familiar? So this was a type of parallel that a number of us were starting to think about in terms of how are we going to get new money onto the table to advance our objectives in space exploration. And then the second thing that happened in 2005 was essentially the announcement of what was then called the vision for space exploration. And this was the George W. Bush era plan to return to the moon, build a moon base, and ultimately use the capabilities to go under Mars. And that basically told me that eventually we're going to need economists in space.
9:06Because if you're building a permanent habitat somewhere else outside of Earth, yes, that's a technology problem. Yes, it's an engineering problem. It is also an economic development problem. You're going to need to think about where the revenue source is going to come for this. Where might you see cost savings for new types of technologies? And so I had decided to go pursue space economics as a field, did my PhD in that. I used to joke that once you do a PhD in the economics of space exploration, there's nowhere else that can really employ you other than NASA. These days, that's not quite the case.
9:37These days, there's such a growth in venture capital and private equity investment in space that actually it's a bit of a booming field, to be honest. So I started my work at NASA Ames Research Center. So this is one of NASA's 10 centers out in Silicon Valley. And I was brought out there to essentially start doing some of the economic analysis related to venture capital. How do we leverage these private companies? And essentially, as I did my work, I started managing some of the programs related to encouraging commercial space development, made my way to Washington, D.C. with kind of the experiences that I'd had in Silicon Valley, working with some of the investors and some of the startup founders, found my way to the office of the administrator.
10:14And during the first Trump administration, that was when the chief economist position was created. I have so many questions already, and I'm already struggling to choose a particular path to go down because there are so many. But one thing that stood out to me just then, you know, you talked about the sort of history of space exploration and the idea that you had these very rich industrialists who were funding the early stages of, I guess, astronomy and observatories. At what point did the U.S. flip into more of a government-funded model for space exploration, and how did that actually happen?
10:49Yeah, it's a great question, and I think it's instructive to think about kind of how do we develop the capabilities to go in space in the first place? So the history of astronomical observatories in the U.S. really begins with these wealthy funders, and there's a mix of motivations. I break it down to these two types of motivations. One are signaling motivations. In economics, a signaling theory is the idea that you can credibly transmit information by costly action, right? This is kind of how you know something about someone when they're driving a Lamborghini versus, you know, say a Ford Pinto, right?
11:20You have some information about the individual, even if you know nothing else. Similar with education. The classic signaling product that I can think of, though, is if you know that one country has launched something around the earth and another country has not, you know something about the technical capacities of that country. Very similar in terms of astronomical observatories. These were very complex projects. They were about billion-dollar projects if we do the kind of inflation-adjusted metrics today. And so the wealthiest people did these things. Fast forward to the 1920s and 30s when the technology for liquid fuel rocketry is being developed.
11:55This year is actually the 100th anniversary of the first flight of a liquid fuel rocket by Robert Goddard.
12:00Tracy Alloway:That's why we did this episode. It was all time for the 100-year anniversary. I always love a centenary. Thanks for doing that. So he's working on this technology because he wants to be able to go to space. He receives the vision of space exploration by reading science fiction when he's a teenager. He reads War of the Worlds in his local newspaper and then a sequel to it, an unauthorized sequel called Edison's Conquest of Mars. And he actually writes in his diary about a vision that he had while trimming a cherry tree on his aunt's farm. And he decides that he's going to dedicate the rest of his life to space exploration.
12:33And every year after, he celebrates what he calls his Cherry Tree Day. So he's going out into the world trying to figure out how is he going to get resources for this project? And it turns out that the largest funder for his early phases is, in fact, the Guggenheim family. He manages to actually convince the Guggenheim family to fund this work. But when the Second World War starts, which is really when the US government starts to get involved with rocketry at a very significant level, he starts working with a number of the generals and essentially gets funding to develop a jet-assisted takeoff rocket to help planes take off more quickly.
13:06And he starts getting funding that way. So the Second World War is really when governments across the world really start to get involved with rocketry development, most famously, of course, in Germany, but also in the Soviet Union. And so after that point, the technology for rocketry is essentially co-evolving as a weapon system and as a technology for taking humans off of the Earth. That's really when the U.S. government gets involved. NASA gets created in 1958 after the flight of Sputnik. And then you have the kind of dual development of essentially the civil program, which is what NASA is, as well as Department of Defense programs.
13:44And both of them are roughly kind of equivalently funded for quite some time.
13:48Tracy Alloway:Well, why don't we talk then about the flip side or the other direction? You mentioned that when you were at NASA, we still had the shuttle program. I've never understood. I mean, why do we get rid of that? Like, why aren't we still launching shuttles and so forth? What was the sort of economic logic or national security logic or whatever, such that from the perspective of the government, we don't need to keep launching shuttles and maybe we can begin the handoff for some of this more directly to the private sector? Yeah, it's a great question. I mean, the shuttle really was an incredible vehicle.
14:21But of course, as I'm sure you're familiar, there were a couple of fatal accidents with the space shuttle. First the Challenger disaster and then the Columbia accident. So essentially the decision was made after the Columbia accident that there was no way to make the vehicle sufficiently safe at a regular rate of flight that would be economical and that it was time to move on to a safer, more economical form of human spaceflight. What's interesting in many ways with the development of vehicles like Starship is that the idea originally behind the space shuttle is very much the same idea that is now motivating the development of Starship at SpaceX.
15:01Low cost, fully reusable aircraft-like operations. That was not ultimately achieved in the space shuttle. You can look back at the original economic estimates for what NASA thought they would be able to fly the space shuttle at, and they turned out to be rather optimistic relative to what was delivered. We'll see where we get to on Starship. But I think it's just important to recognize that it's really part of the same engineering and kind of economic capability thrust shuttle to Starship. It's the same idea. We want low-cost, reusable aircraft-like operations so that we can do more in space. Ultimately, the shuttle was deemed to be no longer safe after the Columbia accident.
15:40Blue Urban Commission was kind of fielded, and they decided that it was time to move on to what then became the Commercial Crew Program. And that came around at the beginning of the first Obama administration. At the time, it was very controversial. You can certainly go back and watch some of the hearings where you've got people like Neil Armstrong who were arguing that this is not a good idea for the nation. At the same time, there was essentially a need within NASA to figure out how to offload some of the operational responsibilities for human spaceflight because NASA was seeking to go back to the moon and ultimately on to Mars.
16:13One of the things that's defining for NASA's strategic landscape is its budget history. Budget history is very easy to describe. It starts in 1958 at a relatively low level. It peaks massively in 1965-66 at the peak of the Apollo program. And then it declines very significantly until 1972. And it has basically been inflation flat ever since. Our ambitions, however, have not been inflation flat. Our ambitions continue to increase. And so as the agency has been figuring out how do we achieve our ambitions, we figured that we would basically partner and figure out how to leverage commercial capabilities and private investment.
17:09Tracy Alloway:running a business means dealing with a lot of overly complicated software and most crms tend to follow the same pattern they're packed with endless features you'll never use interfaces that feel clunky and teams end up spending way too much time just trying to find basic information Today's sponsor, PipeDrive, is a simple CRM tool designed for small and medium businesses. PipeDrive brings you entire sales processes into one dashboard, giving you a crystal clear, complete view of sales processes and customer information designed to help teams stay in control and close more deals faster. It all centers around the visual sales pipeline, where you can see every deal, what stage it's in, and what needs to happen next.
17:44Tracy Alloway:Since everything is in one platform, PipeDrive is designed to unite your team, keep track of sales tasks, and stay on top of your leads. Switch to a CRM, built by salespeople, for salespeople, and joined the over 100 ,000 companies already using PipeDrive. Right now, you'll get a 30-day free trial. No credit card or payment needed. Just head to pipedrive.com slash simpleCRM to get started. That's pipedrive.com slash simpleCRM. The thing about AI for business, it may not automatically fit the way your business works. At IBM, we've seen this firsthand. But by embedding AI across HR, IT, and procurement processes, we've reduced costs by millions, slash repetitive tasks, and freed thousands of hours for strategic work.
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19:36Tracy Alloway:public.com slash disclosures. Have you ever seen the chart of the NASA budget as a share of the federal budget? It's unbelievable. In the mid 60s, over 5 % of the entire federal government budget, at least according to this chart that I pulled up on Reddit just now. No, but I'm pretty sure I've seen this chart before. I think it's right. I think I know the one you're talking about. I mean, it's like a staggering level of the federal government spending was at one point through NASA. And then, of course, it sort of declined into relative oblivion. But it's kind of extraordinary. Well, on this note, Alex, you're talking about NASA's ambitions.
20:09How would you broadly define those? Because it seems if you say that NASA exists for security and as a signal to other countries that we have superior technology to them, you could justify basically any element of spending as we seem to have done in the 1960s. But if you say that we actually want some sort of return on investment in terms of jobs or, I don't know, some sort of multiplier effect on the economy, then you're kind of thinking about different things. Sure. Of course, one of the challenges that I always ran into was that there's this Perino request for calculation on the return on investment, to which I always had to patiently explain that this is not an investment, it's an expenditure, right?
20:50You can't actually calculate a direct return on investment in the way that you can for an actual private sector investment. You can, however, calculate the economic impact. And so every two years, I would be responsible for the release of our economic impact report. And for those curious, that is the highest level resolution data that NASA releases publicly about where it spends its money. And it spends its money across all the 50 states. Oh, yeah. This is famous, right? It has to. It has to. Exactly. Because it is a public program. It is there to meet the needs of the American people as determined by the representatives in Congress.
21:23And so that is a kind of part of the agency's responsibilities and mission. And its missions are essentially defined by that combination of congressional mandates and presidential direction, right? Just like any agency. And so what have been the consistent requests by Congress and presidents to NASA? Well, over the last 40 years, let's say the post-Apollo era and even the post-Shuttle era, we are now on the third attempt to return to the moon and build a permanent habitation there. The first was called the Space Exploration Initiative under George H.W. Bush. Then it was, as I mentioned, the vision for space exploration under George W.
Read the full transcript
22:01Bush. And today we're working on the Artemis program, which I was intimately involved with. And essentially, it is very much, we're using a different strategy now than we've used in the past, but it was essentially the same interest. There's only one world relatively nearby, only three days away. That is the moon. There is also only one planet nearby that you can plausibly land on. That is Mars. I happen to personally be a big fan of flybys of Venus, but that's actually kind of counterintuitively because it is so impossible. When you say personally, you don't mean that you're flying past Venus yourself, right?
22:34Just in theory. I'd be happy to, but I don't think I've got billions for that. But the benefit of Venus is that it is literally so hot and high pressure that it is impossible to land on. So it stops both engineers and politicians from trying to. That's actually a benefit from a program management perspective sometimes. But anyways, the real goal continues to be Mars because Mars you can land on and there is increasing signs of potential previous life having been on Mars. We continue to learn a lot by our robotic missions there. There's starting to be some very interesting indications that there may have been a life there in the past.
23:09It's a very interesting world. And of course, NASA also does robotic missions out to the outer planets. The moons of Saturn and Jupiter are truly some of the most incredible objects in the night sky in our solar system, right? You have moons like Io that have volcanoes that spew lava hundreds, thousands of kilometers above the surface of these planets. You have worlds that are actually ocean worlds underneath these massive ice caps like Europa and Enceladus. Enceladus has water geysers. So it's actually possible to imagine building a probe that could just kind of land under one of these water geysers, open up an aperture, and then assess what might be in that water.
23:49And then one of my favorites, of course, is the moon of Saturn, Titan. Titan is the only moon that we have that has an atmosphere. It's actually, you can't really see through it, but it does have lakes, except the lakes are not water, they're made of methane. And we now have a mission on the books, Dragonfly, which is for me one of the most exciting missions that NASA is doing, to send a robotic helicopter to this moon of Saturn and explore it to learn about this different type of liquid cycle based on methane rather than water. You know, it's a fascinating solar system. And one of NASA's core mandate is to explore that.
24:23And I could keep going on. You've also got the largest number of Earth scientists employed by one agency in the world. A huge amount of the climate data that the world relies on comes from NASA. It also is responsible for aeronautics basic research. A lot of the basic research for fundamental green aviation, electric aviation is funded through NASA. So it has a huge mandate, which is why at the end of the day, NASA is always looking for ways to make that tax dollar go farther, leverage partnerships, leverage private sector investment.
24:53Tracy Alloway:That was great. And I just want to say, like, personally, I'm very pro going to space. I'm very pro landing on the moon again. I think it'd be really cool if in my lifetime someone landed on Mars. I think it's very cool, but why? So if there's going to be private money invested in this, other than the fact that, okay, maybe there can be a return from the private dollars because they're getting public dollars because they could do more, from the economist hat, is there a rationale for some of these projects that you see beyond just this is very interesting and cool. Could it ever turn into return on investment in the classic sense?
25:33So the most classic example that I have of where the economic return came from some of these types of investments really does come from the Apollo program and the early rocketry development in the 1960s. So during that time, for about three years, 75 % of all global semiconductor demand came from these rockets. Oh, yeah. What does that mean? It means that this was a technology that was pushing the boundaries of capability, of technical capability, and it needed this new thing, the semiconductor, in order to be effective. That meant that semiconductor manufacturing got to scale up at a level that it would not otherwise have probably been able to do based on consumer demand.
26:19Tracy Alloway:If I recall from Chip War, it was also the fact that space was scarce on the shuttle, and therefore it helped create the impetus to miniaturize a lot of this technology, which then unlocked various consumer electronic goods. Exactly. The Apollo guidance computer being the other example of that. So that's exactly right. So when you're pushing the technology frontiers for this kind of challenging objective, like going to the moon or going to Mars, you do push the capabilities, and that results in the kind of famous case for spinoff effects. And if there's one thing that I would just love to correct is this idea that spinoff effects are things like Tang, right?
26:58Or these types of more true. I forgot about that. Worth it. We got Tang. Worth it. Right. And that's always used as a kind of, you know, you say, oh, well, yeah, okay, we got some Tang out of it. It's great. But the reality is spinoff effects are semiconductors, right? It is really fundamental technologies of the modern world. Another example of that is the ways in which we now have very advanced space-based internet. In part, this stuff came from a government demand for rocketry. SpaceX, its first major service was providing the government with cargo to the International Space Station. Well, that's a pretty high mass demand.
27:37It's not a small payload to get cargo to the space station. You've actually got to be able to launch a fair bit into orbit. it. Well, once you've already established a demand for something that is high mass, well, what other high mass things can you launch up into space using your existing infrastructure? Turns out the principal demand for SpaceX's rockets are its own products right now, Starlink, and that's also part of the plan for orbital data centers. So these are things that emerge from pushing the technology, from setting really difficult goals. So there's a real kind of economic truth to that whole Kennedy statement of we do these things not because they're easy, because they're hard.
28:08When you do hard things, you create new technology and new capabilities. Can you extrapolate something like the semiconductor experience to, I guess, creating some sort of lunar base? Because I get it for semiconductors. We have computers on Earth. That makes sense. But if you're building a base on the moon, it would seem to me that for at least a very long time, your principal customers are going to be NASA and maybe the Department of Defense. Right. And also potentially other international partners. So right now, the Artemis base camp, as it is being developed, is imagining participation from, for example, Japanese astronauts and European Space Agency astronauts and Canadian Space Agency astronauts.
28:51Actually, the U.S. is committed to landing two Japanese astronauts on the lunar surface. First time the U.S. has ever committed to an international partner landing on the lunar surface with it. And we're now about less than a month away, depending on when the launch actually happens from Artemis II, the first time that we've returned to the moon since 1972, and the very first time ever that a non-American will be on board for a mission that is leaving Earth orbit, Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen. And so the international element is a key part of it as well. I think the lunar economy is one of the ones that's going to be a little bit farther down the road.
29:26I think one of the ones that's coming up sooner is what's called the low-Earth orbit economy, and this refers more to commercial space stations. One of the biggest contractual competitions right now is the competition for who will get the contract for a private space station from NASA. So NASA already starting in 2010, as I mentioned, privatized commercial human space flight with a commercial crew program. That resulted in the SpaceX Dragon capability and the Boeing Starliner capability. Right now, those vehicles are going to the International Space Station. The plan, however, is to retire the International Space Station, the latest date that's been thrown out being 2032.
30:01After that point, there would be, in theory, one or more fully commercially owned space stations. There are companies that are raising money. A couple of them have actually announced hundreds of million dollars investments just in the last couple of weeks. What are they going to be doing? Well, they'll be hosting NASA astronauts. They're going to be hosting international astronauts. It's going to be training. But they're also going to be conducting fundamental research in microgravity. Microgravity is a very interesting phenomenon, because not only do you have no gravity, but because you have no gravity in a pressurized environment, you also have no convection.
30:32And that allows for different phenomena than you see on Earth. So for example, you're able to grow crystals larger. You're able to develop things like fiber optic cables, more pure that may increase the transparency of them. We are still searching one product that we can actually make in space sufficiently profitably and make it again and again and again. We're still in the R &D phase, and we've been working on it for a long time. So it may be a while before we see one of these things. But there is a huge research effort going on across the world to figure out how do we leverage the removal of gravity in the production of many things.
31:11And semiconductors is one of the other areas that we're starting to see a lot of investment in. So that one, I think, is easier to understand. We are to maintain a zero-gravity environment on Earth, pretty close to the source of mass. But when you're flying around the earth, you inherently have that property and people are really exploring how we can make new use out of it and make new products.
31:30Tracy Alloway:It's going to be an interesting race, Tracy, to think like who is going to make something economical first? Sort of that zero gravity space or anyone in crypto? Which industry will deliver something of economic value first? No, but for real. So speaking of actual economic value, and you briefly alluded to it in one of your answers, one of the things you hear is data centers in outer space. And, you know, like Elon is very bullish on it. But of course, he has a rocket company. So of course he would say so. I can't tell is this like just thing that like people on podcasts and Twitter like to talk about?
32:05Tracy Alloway:or from your perspective, from what you can tell, is there a real plausibility that given intense compute demands, and I have to imagine it's like maybe the cooling bill is a little lower up there that maybe this could be like a real thing. Yeah. Obviously one of the currently hot debates within engineering economic analysis in space, how much sense does this make? There's actually been a few folks who've put on really, really good calculators online. So you can kind of look up orbital data center online calculator. And the profitability of it depends on a number of factors. What do you assume the launch cost is?
32:39How often do you assume these GPUs are going to fail? How effective do you assume the radiators are going to be for getting rid of the excess heat? There's a lot of different variables. And given the fact that we don't have any orbital data centers of scale, it's hard to know exactly what their profitability is going to be. I'll say one of the big obvious benefits is not a technological one. It is simply that you probably don't need to go for extensive permits.
33:04Tracy Alloway:No, yeah, for real. But it's a real advantage. There's no space NIMBYs who are going to complain about that. I mean, you may end up, depending on how large these things are and how many of them are and what kind of, what essentially what reflectivity they have. So one of the things that we're now starting to see is with constellations the size of Starlink, these are about 10 ,000 satellites in space, right? The vast majority of satellites that are in space right now that are operational are owned and operated by SpaceX. 10 ,000 or so. Constellations have now been approved and submitted to the ITU and various ones submitted to the FCC at the million satellite scale.
33:39Already a large amount of the night sky, people are very familiar with flyover of these satellites. A orbital data center would be significantly larger and potentially more reflective than a Starlink. So if you've got hundreds of thousands of these up there, you might start really seeing them a lot. How much do we care about that? These are kind of social public choice issues that we're just starting to think about. Speaking of stuff that we might be able to see, are space elevators plausible at all? This idea that we could have space elevators instead of rockets to bring stuff up. I love it. You know, I haven't had a good space elevator question for a long time, so thank you.
34:13Maybe that says something about their plausibility, but go on. Well, you know, they're a fun idea, right? I mean, Arthur C. Clarke, I mean, it's a beautiful kind of vision. And as far as I understand it, they're very reliant on high-performance carbon nanotubes and equivalent technologies. And the joke I've always kind of maintained is, you know, I will wait until we have a bridge or a swing set made out of carbon nanotubes before I get too excited for the space automator. In order for them to work, they would need to be about 36 ,000 kilometers in length, right? Because your goal is to get them into a place where they are in geo, somewhere stable.
34:47If it's not in geo, then it's going to be continually moving around. And, you know, that doesn't really work. So it's got to be in an orbit that is basically staying above the same place on Earth, that's two-synchronous orbit, 36 ,000 kilometers away. These are going to be very long carbon nanotubes. So I'm not planning on that anytime soon.
35:20So there's a lot of noise about AI, but time's too tight for more promises.
35:24Tracy Alloway:So let's talk about results. At IBM, we work with our employees to integrate technology right into the systems they need. Now, a global workforce of 300 ,000 can use AI to fill their HR questions, resolving 94 % of common questions. Not noise. Proof of how we can help companies get smarter by putting AI where it actually pays off, deep in the work that moves the business. Let's create smarter business. IBM. Support for the show comes from Public. Public is an investing platform that offers access to stocks, options, bonds, and crypto. And they've also integrated AI with tools that can assist investors in building customized portfolios.
36:02One of these tools is called Generated Assets. It allows you to turn your ideas into investable indexes. So let's say you're interested in something specific like biotech companies with high R &D spend, small cap stocks with improving operating margins, or the S &P 500 minus high debt companies. Chances are there isn't an ETF that fits your exact criteria. But on public, you just type in a prompt and their AI screens thousands of stocks and build a one-of-a-kind index. You can even backtest it against the S &P 500. Then you can invest in a few clicks. Go to public.com slash market and earn an uncapped 1 % bonus when you transfer your portfolio.
36:41That's public.com slash market.
36:43Tracy Alloway:Add paid for by Public Holdings. Brokered services by Public Investing, member FINRA SIPC. Advisory services by Public Advisors, SEC Registered Advisor, crypto services by ZeroHash. Sample prompts are for illustrative purposes only, not investment advice. All investing involves risk of loss. See complete disclosures at public.com slash disclosures. Small businesses are the pulse of every community. They bring people together, create opportunities, and drive growth. With a widespread presence in communities across the country, Chase for Business supports small business owners at a local level. That makes it possible for you to connect, learn from each other, and grow together.
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37:54Message and data rates may apply. JPMorgan Chase Bank N.A. Member FDIC. Copyright 2026. JPMorgan Chase and Company. You know, you're obviously focused on the economics of particular projects, but I imagine the technology matters as well. How do you actually evaluate the technology? Because as outsiders to this space, space, space pun. No, I won't do it. I resisted, Joe. So as outsiders to this particular topic, it's very difficult for us to get a handle on what seems feasible just in terms of basic physics versus what seems feasible, both in terms of reality and also the money that it might actually cost.
38:35Yeah, it's a great question. One of the things that I loved about working at NASA was that, you know, you're working with some of the smartest people in the world and you're all working for public good and you're just trying to figure out, you know, what's the right thing to do for the country. and the way that the agency evaluates these types of technologies and projects is through teams and you have a team with a number of different capabilities and skill sets so you'll have people who are very familiar with systems engineering combined with people with experience and you know expertise in material sciences throw in an economist throw in a lawyer and you all as a team evaluate you know what is this what would it take to make this thing real you know what benefits would it have?
39:14And you do these types of grassroots engineering economics assessments of these projects. And part of the joy is that you tend to do these things dedicated for days, weeks, depending on how long or how serious of a procurement it might be. But a lot of that kind of stays kind of behind the door, so to speak. So we don't put as much of that out. And when we do, it'll be in these kind of procurement announcements where you kind of will talk about the strengths and the weaknesses of a project. If you really want to kind of get a sense of how the agency does these types of evaluations. Next time there's a very big procurement that is coming out of the agency, like we did for the human landing systems to return humans to the lunar surface, go look at the procurement assessment the agency does on the projects.
39:56How long are those assessments typically? You know, they can be dozens of pages, right? And they'll get into some of the technical issues. You know, obviously there's proprietary technology involved. So, you know, it's not like it's giving you the kind of, you know, blueprint diagnostics necessarily, but there's a lot of information in them. And so that's the benefit of having a public agency like NASA is that it does have to actually put out these types of assessments publicly.
40:18Tracy Alloway:Wait, are we really sending people back to the moon next month? We are sending people back to the moon in a flyby. Oh. So the Artemis 2 mission will take four crew in the Orion around the moon and then return on a roughly, you know, kind of week-long mission, give or take. And then what's the timeline for when we want to land on the moon again? That is the$25 billion question. there has been a change in the way that the agency has approached its lunar landing efforts. So in the Apollo program, NASA did rely on contractors that relied on Grumman, the Grumman Lander System that they built, but that was ultimately owned and operated and kind of managed by NASA, right?
40:55With the shift to commercial services and operations, that is not the case right now for NASA's landing plans. The landers are owned and operated and managed as services by SpaceX and Blue Origin. And so there isn't quite the same level of insight and certainty. And you might say there's some arbitrary certainty in kind of government timelines, which is absolutely true. But we don't quite know at the same level. For example, NASA has not clarified publicly how many refueling flights they expect to be needed for a first lander of Starship, in part because that depends on the performance of Starship.
41:33And we don't quite yet know. We're still waiting on the version three flight coming up here in the next month or two. So there's a lot of uncertainty around when that landing would be. The NASA administrator, Jared Eisenman, just announced a change to the Artemis campaign, inserting a flight in between this next flight of Artemis 2 and the projected landing. And that would be equivalent to the old Apollo 9 mission where you're going to test docking the lander with the crew module in low Earth orbit. And the agency suggested actually that if both landers are ready, the Blue Origin and the SpaceX lander, maybe a low-Earth orbit Orion might dock with both of them.
42:10So long way of saying, there's still a number of technical steps that need to go. I think the agency is targeted 28 for a landing, but we will see. The architecture for lunar landing this time is not as simple as it was in the Apollo program. It involves a lot more launches to the point where we don't yet quite even know how many.
42:28Tracy Alloway:Talk to us a little bit about Elon Musk has a Mars obsession and he's not just interested in exploring whatever lakes or potential, you know, he's actually talked about colonizing Mars, but I don't totally get that. I'm sure I could read a book on it. In fact, I think there is a famous book that inspired everyone. I got to read that. But like, there's no oxygen up there. It must be pretty miserable. Like, what's the idea behind actually living on Mars. And does that seem, and, you know, I have to say, just to back up for a second, like, I don't think we'll ever see a space elevator in our life, but I absolutely think there will be one eventually.
43:03Tracy Alloway:And if it happens in a thousand years, that's a very short time in the grand scheme of things for human history. So like, but like, okay, so maybe we don't, we never see Mars in my lifetime, but what is the idea generally beyond, behind the idea that Mars is a theoretically habitable location that maybe could be economically productive or useful to decamp to in some way. Yeah. I think you're asking kind of one of the most fundamental existential questions about our, you know, journey into space, right? In theory, we have a long time to go, right? We've got approximately, you know, 1 billion years, give or take, until this planet becomes uninhabitable, right?
43:42And so ultimately, as H.G. Wells would have it, it's all the universe or nothingness, Either we manage to escape the planet of our origin and we have further experiences and expansion and adventures out amongst the stars, or we don't. So part of the long-run vision is that eventually humans will figure out how to leave not just our planet, but our solar system. However, we do not have a real good understanding of how we would at all make that possible today. And so part of the thought is we're going to need to learn how to live out in space for extended periods of time. The longest that we live in space these days is about one year.
44:18There have been Russian missions in the past that have lasted longer in low Earth orbit, but our medical docs these days at NASA pretty much don't clear anyone beyond one year. So the idea of going to Mars has kind of developed over the centuries. For a long time, we thought that there would be much more habitable, right? We thought there might be oxygen there. There isn't. There's a really good book that's come out in the last couple of years called City on Mars, which really kind of goes through some of these things that you're talking about, which is that really might not be that nice of a place to live.
44:46You know, when you ever get the question, where do you want to go? I often say Venus because it's kind of a one year and back mission, because ultimately I want to stay on Earth. It's literally where all of the restaurants are. Right. There are restaurants anywhere else in the solar system. And so there's a kind of sense of that frontier mentality that I think appeals to some people's narratives, even if they don't necessarily spend a lot of time on any frontiers themselves. and I think that idea of going out to a new world and learning from that world is also a different related motivator, right?
45:15There is a scientific interest of exploration. What can we learn from this genuinely different alien world? And what can we learn about ourselves by learning to live on it for decades, centuries? There's a cultural argument that some of my friends kind of really like, which is this argument that goes back to Arthur C. Clarke, which is that fundamentally, it's about getting variation in humanity, variation in the cultures of humanity. What will we learn? What kind of different humanity will emerge from life in other worlds? We don't know. But that seems like an interesting question and interesting exploration.
45:48So I know you spoke previously about how private capital has always had a role in space exploration to various degrees. But when you look at 2026, I think some people would argue that a lot of territory has been ceded to private companies like SpaceX. When you think about your framework of looking at this, are there certain places or things or missions that you think are better for federal funding to take on versus private capital? Yeah. For me, the big determinant is whether or not this is something that is going to require public dollars for essentially the foreseeable future, that there really aren't options as far as we can reasonably assess for there being private markets.
46:40For example, on launch vehicles, there were private markets. The US went from having essentially zero market share of global launches in 2007 to now basically having 75 % or above because of the success of SpaceX. There is a global market to launch. It's also a global market in satellite internet, right? So these are ones where it makes sense to have private companies in the lead. There may be kind of natural monopoly challenges. So you may think about how you're going to manage that in the future. But we do that in other industries too. So for me, the reason we're experimenting in space stations is because we think that might be an area where there really might be some commercial market.
47:20We've actually seen multiple different private missions that have been paid for. They're not yet at kind of a very significant share of the market for human spaceflight. but it's certainly a lot more than it was 10 years ago when it was zero. And now it's a few percentage. For me, some of the things that we need to make sure kind of stay within the public domain within kind of NASA management operation includes things like operating the moon base. It is going to be a very expensive proposition. There may be some elements to that, that it may make sense to have a private sector experimentation and potentially even infrastructure ownership.
47:51For example, you can imagine a world where you might have a baseline power system on the lunar surface that is kind of owned by the government. But if there's kind of interest in expanding that, well, maybe you have some private sector kind of, you know, take on some of the risks to see whether or not they have some other infrastructure options there. If we don't have that privately owned, then I think there might be some challenges of kind of pushback, right? To what extent do you want your tax dollars going to fund Jeff Bezos's moon base versus, you know, the National Lunar Research Station?
48:18I think people's answers on that are potentially different. And given the fact that it's essentially public tax dollars that are paying for all these things. I think that's something we need to consider. So, you know, the standard answer is that we have the government take on these higher risk activities where there really is no market demand. But I also think that we need to think about this as an infrastructure play. For a long period of time, we're going to be reliant on publicly funded resources for these things. And I think, therefore, there needs to be some public management of that through an agency like NASA.
48:47Tracy Alloway:We can have private companies doing some of the lunar services like catering the space station. We could get like Sodexo or one of those companies to handle that. I'd be comfortable outsourcing some of that. What is the deal with lunar territory? Have governments tried to claim slices of the moon? Let's say we land, it was a U.S. base station on the moon. Would we then say that that is American property, that area? What is international law established with regards to claims on the moon or elsewhere? Yep. Great question. So this was actually resolved in the 60s with the Outer Space Treaty, 1967.
49:23So prior to any human landing on the moon, essentially the powers of the world, including the Soviet Union and the US and China, all decided we don't want the same type of kind of territorial acquisition scramble that we've seen in human history to take place on the moon. So there was an agreement that essentially there will not be any assertion of national territory and under national law, there are no private sector actors. So essentially, there won't be any ownership of territory. However, there is ownership of the assets that you put there. So any moon base that you put there, any physical infrastructure would be American infrastructure.
50:01But just like in Antarctica, there are provisions within the Outer Space Treaty to allow other countries to come and visit these facilities. They can notify and say, we'd like to come visit your facility to make sure that there isn't any untoward military activity happening there. So there's this principle of reciprocity of visitation that's established. And the idea that we can also mine has already been established. So what I always like to say is that no matter what business idea that you have on lunar surface, you can probably engage on it right now if you can make the case, with the exception of property speculation.
50:34If you want to go build a hotel on the moon, you can afford to do it. and you can just put it down. You'll get the license to do it. You don't own the territory, but you can put it there. If you want to mine something, the Space Act of 2015 that was approved by Congress and signed into law established that if you mine it, essentially you own it, right? So if you take something from the lunar surface, that's been established. The Artemis Accord signatories have all basically signed up to that. So that's now a very popular proposition around the world. And if you think about it, we've already established that.
51:01When we brought back rocks from the Apollo program, no one debated that the United States could essentially do what it wanted with that. And US gave it out to countries around the world, used it for scientific purposes. So we've already established a lot of those principles, but the idea that there's going to be territory is one that currently the outer space treaty, I would argue, thankfully kind of establishes is not one that we're gonna be competing over. How often do you think about the economic impacts of an alien invasion? You know, only on Fridays. Is this not like a thought experiment that they assign to all NASA economists?
51:34You know, it's a great point. When the agency reestablishes the position, we should absolutely make that a requirement of reporting out on that. Obviously, in an alien invasion, it would probably be pretty catastrophic. I would certainly recommend to any listeners, you know, the Three Body Problem series by Chick-fil-A-Boo. If they haven't read it, it's absolutely fantastic and, you know, makes a pretty clear case that it would be a rough time. All right, Alex, thank you so much for coming on Odd Lots. Thank you for coming to our party. I'm so glad we actually met and I did get to ask you the question of what it is that you do.
52:05So really appreciate it. Thanks. It was a real pleasure.
52:21Joe, that was fascinating. I mean, part of me just likes hearing what we're up to now when it comes to space exploration. And the answer, it turns out, is, you know, a decent amount. There were so many questions that we didn't even get to. I kind of wanted to ask for an economist's take on the procurement process of NASA as well. But we're going to have to have Alex back on.
52:41Tracy Alloway:Procurement is actually, I want to do more on that specifically because I imagine that there's a lot of sort of small startups in both the sort of space and defense area. I mean, we know there's a lot of defense tech startups and I assume there's a lot of space tech startups. How you actually evaluate those ones. I mean, it's actually really impressive thinking about backing SpaceX in 2008 when it was long before they had sort of proven that they could do reusable rockets at scale. And now we've all seen the videos and they still blow my mind every single time. That was a really good bet. And it was like, you know, I'm sure a lot of people thought that that was completely implausible or whatever very recently in history.
53:20Tracy Alloway:So that's pretty extraordinary. I am also I'm still and I think that's right. I looked up this chart again on the Wikipedia page. Four and a half percent of one point, the entire federal budget was NASA, which just seems like so hard to believe right now that this was like a really big part of what the government was spending money on. Well, this is the thing. If you couch it in existential terms, then, you know, the upward limit of your budget becomes, I guess, not infinity, but, you know, four percent. I do wonder, like, it does not seem implausible to me that we have another Sputnik moment with China.
53:55Tracy Alloway:What if like tomorrow they're like, oh, we're landing. This is the other thing I wanted to ask about how NASA differs from China's space agency. But look, what if like, you know, they're like, oh, yeah, we have we have someone landing on the moon next week or something like that. Like it seems plausible at some point. They've figured out. China suddenly builds a space elevator. They figured out about it. They figured out reusable rockets. You know what the name of their reusable rocket is? What? The Long March 10. Really? That's good. Yeah, it's a good name. And anyway, yeah, I thought that was a great conversation.
54:27Tracy Alloway:And I just want to say, like, I don't, you know, I'm pretty skeptical of the fact that anytime soon we're going to get like actual economic productivity out of space, whether it's from mining or I don't know, maybe the data centers thing will happen. But I'm still pro spending money on going to space just for the sake of it. I think it's I think it's inspiring if we saw some people land on the moon and hang out there for a while. Well, it would be in such better video condition. You know what I'm saying? It wouldn't be those, you know, we could see it in the high def and they could do stuff instead of those grainy things that maybe some people were shot on like a set.
54:59Joe, why don't you just use AI to pretend to be on the moon? I don't want to see it.
55:03Tracy Alloway:Would you go? To the moon? Yeah. It depends on how far developed that particular technology is. I would definitely go. I mean, as long as they thought it was like plausible and other people were going, I'd go. I would need a certain amount of successful missions before I agreed to. You'd be on the first one. I'd be on the first one. Let's do it. Yeah. All right. All right. Well, in the name of Odd Lots, maybe I would consider. Yeah, do it for content. For content. That's right. Okay. Shall we leave it there? Let's leave it there. This has been another episode of the Odd Lots podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway.
55:33You can follow me at Tracy Alloway.
55:35Tracy Alloway:And I'm Joe Weisenthal. You can follow me at The Stalwart. Follow our producers, Carmen Rodriguez at CarmenArmand, Dashiell Bennett at Dashbot, and Kale Brooks at Kale Brooks. And for more Odd Lots content, go to Bloomberg.com slash Odd Lots. We have a daily newsletter into all of our episodes. And you can chat about all these topics 24-7 in our Discord, discord.gg slash oddlots. And if you enjoy Oddlots, if you want Joe and I to be on the first space flight to the moon in the name of Oddlots content, then please leave us a positive review on your favorite podcast platform. And remember, if you are a Bloomberg subscriber, you can listen to all of our episodes absolutely ad-free.
56:11All you need to do is find the Bloomberg channel on Apple Podcasts and follow the instructions there. Thanks for listening. Thank you.
56:48Tracy Alloway:Hi, I'm Angie Hicks, co-founder of Angie. And one thing I've learned is that you buy a house, but you make it a home. Because with every fix, update, and renovation, it becomes a little more your own. So you need all your jobs done well. For nearly 30 years, Angie has helped millions of homeowners hire skilled pros for the projects that matter. From plumbing to electrical, roof repair to deck upgrades. So leave it to the pros who will get your jobs done well. Angie, the one you trust to find the ones you trust. Find a pro for your project at Angie.com. Hey, it's Ryan Seacrest for Jewel Osco. It's stock up savings time.
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From the publisher
This week, NASA is scheduled to launch Artemis II, a mission that will send astronauts around the moon for the first time in more than 50 years. But this comes at a time when the space agency is facing some pretty big funding challenges, as well as growing competition with private players like SpaceX. In this episode, we speak with Alexander MacDonald, who served as NASA's first chief economist and is now a senior associate at the Aerospace Security Project at CSIS. We talk about why the space agency had economists, how space exploration is funded, and how NASA measures its own economic impact. Please note, this episode was recorded March 10.
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