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- [00:00]
Sponsor Voice
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- [02:09]
Bloomberg Audio Studios Podcasts Radio News.
- [02:24]
Tracy Alloway
Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots Podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway.
- [02:28]
Joe Weisenthal
And I'm Joe Weisenthal.
- [02:30]
Tracy Alloway
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?
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Joe Weisenthal
Yeah.
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Tracy Alloway
And you just get a response that kind of blows your mind. It's something that you've never even thought of before.
- [02:44]
Joe Weisenthal
First of all, can I say my favorite question at parties is what do you do? I've heard that there's.
- [02:50]
Tracy Alloway
I know some people look down on their life. It's fascinating.
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Joe Weisenthal
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, no, I do. Like, oh, where do you live? Whatever, I wanna know what you do. I mean, look, in some instances, maybe people don't wanna 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.
- [03:11]
Tracy Alloway
Absolutely.
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Joe Weisenthal
And as podcast hosts, we're always looking for interesting people.
- [03:16]
Tracy Alloway
That's right. And sometimes you meet them at parties. This person that we're gonna 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 do you do? What is it that you actually do? And the answer that came back was, I was NASA's first chief economist.
- [03:36]
Joe Weisenthal
Amazing. Sold.
- [03:37]
Tracy Alloway
Have you ever heard of that before?
- [03:38]
Joe Weisenthal
I would, 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
- [04:03]
Tracy Alloway
is stats in space.
- [04:04]
Joe Weisenthal
Well then the other thing is, you know, I know that there's growing interest in the commercial applications in space. And so satellites are another, are one area. Obviously defense. People talk about asteroid mining. I don't know if we'll ever see that in our lifetimes. But I know that that's the thing people are interested in. So although I would not have necessarily thought it, you know, I could. I guess I'm not totally surprised that NASA's like, all right, let's bring in an economist in.
- [04:28]
Tracy Alloway
Well, I was pretty surprised. I guess I'd never thought about it.
- [04:30]
Joe Weisenthal
Yeah, I never thought about it.
- [04:32]
Tracy Alloway
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. And we've talked about this before, this idea that NASA has perhaps been ceding a lot of territory in many ways to Private capital, Space X 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, but 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. Alex, thank you so much for coming on opbots.
- [05:22]
Alex MacDonald
Thank you so much. It's a pleasure to be here.
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Joe Weisenthal
Thanks for coming to our party too.
- [05:26]
Alex MacDonald
Good party. I enjoyed it. Thank you.
- [05:27]
Joe Weisenthal
Awesome.
- [05:28]
Tracy Alloway
Excellent. So, obvious question first, I suppose, what does a chief economist at NASA actually do?
- [05:34]
Alex MacDonald
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 canceled at the beginning of this Trump administration. But they had been essentially people who would be brought into the agency to advise the administrator on technical issues related to economics. Chief economist, technology chief technologist and science Chief scientist. These 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 U.S. it has international partnerships, and of course, it has an extensive amount of contracts 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? Has this company actually raised money or are they perhaps, maybe 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 more one of the types of internal services that essentially the senior leadership at NASA decided they needed.
- [07:19]
Joe Weisenthal
That was fantastic. Just real quickly backing up even further. Why you in that role? What were you doing prior to that role, such that you got brought in for this?
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Alex MacDonald
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 SpaceShipOne. This was the first privately funded, privately built spacecraft to take humans above the von Karman line, above 100 km, which is the kind of international definition of where space starts. And 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. Rockefeller, 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 on a Mars. And that basically told me that eventually we're going to need economists in space. Because 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 from 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. 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. 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. And during the first Trump administration, that was when the chief Economist position was created.
- [10:17]
Tracy Alloway
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 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 US flip into more of a government funded model for space exploration? And how did that actually happen?
- [10:48]
Alex MacDonald
Yeah, 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 US 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. This is kind of how you know something about someone when they're driving a Lamborghini versus say a Ford Pinto. Right? You 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. This year is actually the 100th anniversary of the first flight of a liquid fuel rocket by Robert Goddard.
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Joe Weisenthal
That's why we did this episode. It was all time for the 100 year anniversary.
- [12:03]
Tracy Alloway
That's right.
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Alex MacDonald
I always love a good centenary, you know, 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. And 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. And 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 US 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. And both of them are roughly kind of equivalently funded for quite some time.
- [13:47]
Joe Weisenthal
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
- [13:59]
Sponsor Voice
we get rid of that?
- [14:00]
Joe Weisenthal
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.
- [14:17]
Alex MacDonald
Yeah, it's a great question. I mean, the shuttle really was an incredible vehicle. But 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, it was very much the same idea that is now motivating the development of Starship at SpaceX. Low cost, fully reusable aircraft like operations. That was not ultimately achieved in, 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, Blue 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. 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 are 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 onto Mars. One 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 Paul program, and then it declines very significantly until 1972. And it has basically been inflated, 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.
- [17:08]
Sponsor Voice
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- [19:50]
Joe Weisenthal
IBM 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.
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Tracy Alloway
I think I know the one.
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Joe Weisenthal
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.
- [20:19]
Tracy Alloway
Well, on this note, Alex, you're talking about NASA's ambitions. How 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. Of jobs or, I don't know, some sort of multiplier effect on the economy, then you're kind of thinking about different things.
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Alex MacDonald
Sure. Of course, one of the challenges that I always ran into was that there's this perennial 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. You 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.
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Tracy Alloway
Oh, yeah, this is famous, right? It has to.
- [21:27]
Alex MacDonald
It has to, exactly. Because it is a public program. It is there to meet the needs of the American people as determined by their representatives in Congress. And 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. Bush. And today we are working on the Artemis program, which I was intimately involved with. And essentially it is very much we are 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 impulsive.
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Tracy Alloway
When you say personally, you don't mean that you're flying past Venus yourself, right?
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Alex MacDonald
Just in theory, I'd be happy to, but I don't think I'd aliens 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 life there in the past. It'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. And 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 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. A 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. And I could keep going on. You've also got the largest number of Earth scientists employed by one agency in the world. 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's always looking for ways to make that tax dollar go farther. Leverage partnerships, leverage private sector investment.
- [25:06]
Joe Weisenthal
That was great. And I just want to say, personally, I'm very pro going to space. I'm very pro landing on the moon. Again, I think it would 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?
- [25:46]
Alex MacDonald
So 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 rocket redevelopment 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.
- [26:32]
Joe Weisenthal
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.
- [26:46]
Alex MacDonald
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, you know, 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. Or these types of More I forgot about that.
- [27:13]
Tracy Alloway
Worth it. We got Tang. Worth it, right.
- [27:15]
Alex MacDonald
And that's always used as a kind of, you know, you say, oh, well, yeah, okay, we got some Tang out of this. Great. But the reality is spinoff effects are semiconductors, Right? It is really fundamental technologies of the modern world. Another example of that is, you know, the ways in which we now have very advanced space based Internet. Right. In part, this stuff came from, from A government demand for rocketry. Right. SpaceX, its first major service, was providing the government with cargo to the International Space Station. Well, that's a pretty high mass demand. It'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. 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. And when you do hard things, you create new technology and new capabilities.
- [28:25]
Tracy Alloway
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.
- [28:49]
Alex MacDonald
Right. And also potentially other international partners.
- [28:52]
Tracy Alloway
Okay.
- [28:53]
Alex MacDonald
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. Actually, the US is committed to landing two Japanese astronauts on the lunar surface. The first time the US 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 2. 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. I 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 for a private space station from NASA. So NASA already, starting in 2010, as I mentioned, privatized commercial human spaceflight 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. After 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. And 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 and 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. And semiconductors is one of the other areas that we're starting to see a lot of investment in. So I think that one, I think is easier to understand. Hard 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.
- [31:42]
Joe Weisenthal
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, or from your perspective, from what you could 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.
- [32:33]
Alex MacDonald
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, you know, orbital data center online calculator. And the profitability of it depends on a number of factors. What do you assume the launch cost is? How 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.
- [33:16]
Joe Weisenthal
No. Yeah, for real.
- [33:17]
Alex MacDonald
But it's a real advantage.
- [33:19]
Joe Weisenthal
There's no space NIMBYs who are going to complain about that.
- [33:23]
Alex MacDonald
Yeah, 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. 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. Already a large amount of the night sky people are very familiar, fly over 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? Right. These are. These are kind of social, you know, social public choice issues that, you know, we're just starting to think about.
- [34:13]
Tracy Alloway
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
- [34:22]
Alex MacDonald
up, I love it. You know, I haven't had a good space elevator question for a long time, so. Thank you.
- [34:26]
Tracy Alloway
Maybe that says something about their plausibility, but go on.
- [34:29]
Alex MacDonald
Well, you know, they're a fun idea.
- [34:30]
Sponsor Voice
Right.
- [34:30]
Alex MacDonald
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 elevator. In order for them to work, they would need to be about 36,000 km in length, right? Because your goal is to get them into a place where they are in geo, somewhere stable. If 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 geosynchronous orbit, 36,000 kilometers away. These are going to be very long carbon nanotubes, so I'm not planning on that anytime soon.
- [35:32]
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- [37:52]
Tracy Alloway
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. 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.
- [38:24]
Alex MacDonald
Yeah, it's a great question. One of the things that I loved about working at NASA was that you're working with some of the smartest people in the world and you're all working for the public good, and you're just trying to figure out 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 in expertise in material sciences. Throw in an economist, throw in a lawyer, and you all, as a team, evaluate, what is this? What would it take to make this thing real? What benefits would it have? And you do these types of grassroots engineering economics assessments of these projects. And part of the kind 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 stays 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.
- [39:45]
Tracy Alloway
How long are those assessments typically?
- [39:47]
Alex MacDonald
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.
- [40:07]
Joe Weisenthal
Wait, are we really sending people back to the moon next month?
- [40:09]
Alex MacDonald
We are sending people back to the moon in a flyby.
- [40:12]
Joe Weisenthal
Oh.
- [40:12]
Alex MacDonald
So the Artemis II mission will take four crew in the Orion around the moon and, and then return on a roughly kind of week long mission, give or take.
- [40:20]
Joe Weisenthal
And then what's the timeline for when we want to land on the moon again?
- [40:25]
Alex MacDonald
That is the $25 billion question. There is 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, relied on Grumman, the Grumman lander system that they built, but that was ultimately owned and operated and kind of managed by NASA. Right. With 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. And we don't quite yet know. We're still waiting on the version 3 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 kind of 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. So 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.
- [42:17]
Joe Weisenthal
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 actually talks about colonizing Mars, but I don't totally get that. I'm sure I could read a book on it.
- [42:33]
Sponsor Voice
In fact, I think there is a
- [42:34]
Joe Weisenthal
famous book that inspired everyone. I got to read that. But like, there's no oxygen up there. 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. 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?
- [43:15]
Alex MacDonald
Yeah, I think you're asking kind of one of the most fundamental existential questions about our journey into space. Right. In theory, we have a long time to go. Right. We've got approximately 1 billion years, give or take, until this planet becomes uninhabitable. Right. And so ultimately, as HG Wells would have it, it's all the universe or nothingness. Right. 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. There 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 it 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 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. You 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.
- [44:44]
Tracy Alloway
Right.
- [44:44]
Alex MacDonald
There are zero 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. There 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.
- [45:37]
Tracy Alloway
So 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?
- [46:08]
Alex MacDonald
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. Right. That there really aren't options, as far as we can kind of reasonably assess for there being private markets. So, for 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. There's also a global market in satellite Internet. 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. We've actually seen multiple different private missions that have been paid for. They're not yet at 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 stay within the the public domain within 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 makes sense to have private sector experimentation and potentially even infrastructure ownership. For 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 is kind of interest in expanding that, well, maybe you have some private sector take on some of the risk 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 pushback. Right. To what extent do you want your tax dollars going to fund Jeff Bezos moon Base versus the National Lunar Research Station? I 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 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.
- [48:36]
Joe Weisenthal
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 US 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.
- [49:05]
Alex MacDonald
Yep, great question. So this was actually resolved in the 60s with the Outer Space Treaty, 1967. So 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. But 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 a lunar surface, you can probably engage on it right now if you can make the case, with the exception of property speculation, if you want to go build a hotel on the Moon, you can afford to do it and you can just put it down. You 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. 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 when 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 established. This is not one that we're going to be competing over.
- [51:10]
Tracy Alloway
How often do you think about the economic impacts of an alien invasion?
- [51:14]
Alex MacDonald
You know, only on Fridays.
- [51:19]
Tracy Alloway
Is this not like a thought experiment that they assign to all NASA economists,
- [51:23]
Alex MacDonald
you know, it's a great point. When the agency re establishes the position, we should absolutely make that a requirement of, you know, reporting out on that. Obviously, an alien invasion would probably, probably be pretty catastrophic. I would certainly recommend to any listeners, you know, the three Body problem series by Chet. If they haven't read it, it's absolutely fantastic and you know, makes pretty clear case that it'll be a rough time.
- [51:44]
Tracy Alloway
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. So really appreciate it.
- [51:56]
Alex MacDonald
Thanks. It was a real pleasure.
- [52:09]
Tracy Alloway
Joe, 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 take on the procurement process
- [52:25]
Joe Weisenthal
of NASA as well.
- [52:27]
Tracy Alloway
But we're going to have to have
- [52:28]
Joe Weisenthal
Alex back on 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.
- [52:52]
Alex MacDonald
Yeah.
- [52:52]
Joe Weisenthal
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. So that's pretty extraordinary. I am also, I'm still, and I think that's right. I looked up this chart again and 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.
- [53:25]
Tracy Alloway
Well, this is the thing. If you couch, if you couch it in existential terms, then, you know, the upward limit of your budget becomes, I guess not infinity, but, you know, 4% pretty good.
- [53:38]
Joe Weisenthal
I do wonder, like, it does not seem implausible to me that we have another Sputnik moment with China. What if like tomorrow they're like, oh, we're landing, we're landing.
- [53:46]
Tracy Alloway
The other thing I want to ask about how NASA differs, differs from China's space agency.
- [53:51]
Joe Weisenthal
But look, because 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.
- [53:59]
Tracy Alloway
They figured out China suddenly builds a space elevator.
- [54:01]
Joe Weisenthal
They figured out about it. They figured out reusable rockets, too. You know what the name of their reusable rocket is?
- [54:08]
Tracy Alloway
What?
- [54:08]
Sponsor Voice
The Long March ten.
- [54:10]
Tracy Alloway
Really?
- [54:11]
Joe Weisenthal
Yeah.
- [54:11]
Tracy Alloway
That's good.
- [54:12]
Joe Weisenthal
Yeah, it's a good name. Anyway. Yeah, I thought that was a great conversation. And I just want to say, like, I don't, you know, I'm pretty skeptical of the fact that anytime soon we're gon, 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.
- [54:37]
Tracy Alloway
Well, I mean, it would be in
- [54:38]
Joe Weisenthal
such better video condition. You know what I'm saying? Like those. It wouldn't be those. You know, we could see it in high def and they could do stuff instead of those grainy things that maybe some people were shot on, like a set.
- [54:47]
Tracy Alloway
So why don't you just use AI to pretend to be on the moon?
- [54:50]
Sponsor Voice
I want to see it.
- [54:51]
Joe Weisenthal
Would you go to the moon?
- [54:53]
Tracy Alloway
Yeah, it depends on how far developed that particular technology is.
- [54:58]
Joe Weisenthal
I would definitely go. I mean, as long as they thought it was, like, plausible and other people were going, I'd go.
- [55:03]
Tracy Alloway
I would need a certain amount of successful missions before I agree to. You'd be on the first one?
- [55:08]
Joe Weisenthal
Yeah, I'd be on the first one.
- [55:09]
Sponsor Voice
Let's do it.
- [55:10]
Tracy Alloway
Yeah. All right. All right. Well, in the name of Odd Lots, maybe I would consider.
- [55:13]
Joe Weisenthal
Yeah, for. For the. For. Do it for content.
- [55:15]
Tracy Alloway
For content. That's right. Okay. Shall we leave it there?
- [55:17]
Joe Weisenthal
Let's leave it there.
- [55:18]
Tracy Alloway
This has been another episode of the Odd Lots podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway. You can follow me at Tracy Alloway.
- [55:23]
Joe Weisenthal
And I'm Joe Weisenthal. You can follow me at the Stalwart. Follow our producers, Carmen Rodriguez at CarmenArmondaShell Bennett at Dashbot and Kale Brooks at Kale Brooks. And for more Odd Lots content, go to bloomberg.com oddlod we have a daily newsletter and all of our episodes and you can chat about all of these topics 24. 7 in our Discord Discord GG/Oddlau and
- [55:44]
Tracy Alloway
if you enjoy Odd Lots, if you want Joe and I to be on the first space flight to the moon in the name of Odd Lots 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. All you need to do is find the Bloomberg Channel on Apple Podcasts and follow the instructions there. Thanks for listening
- [56:09]
Joe Weisenthal
Sam.
- [56:38]
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