Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Space Policy Edition #19: When did the private space age begin? Much earlier than you think.

Episode Date: December 1, 2017

Elon Musk. Jeff Bezos. Richard Branson. These are the names we tend to associate with the current era of private space exploration. But what about John Quincy Adams, James Lick, or Charles Yerkes? Space economist and historian Dr. Alex MacDonald joins us to discuss his book, "The Long Space Age," which chronicles the history of private investment in U.S. space exploration all the way back to the 18th century.Jason and Casey also discuss the consequences of the House GOP tax plan, which could raise taxes on thousands of graduate students. Also, the coming budget showdown and possible consequences for NASA projects.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hello again everyone, this is the Space Policy Edition of Planetary Radio. I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society, proud to join you once again with my colleagues from the advocacy and space policy side of the house, Casey Dreyer and Jason Callahan. Casey is our Director of space policy. Jason is our space policy advisor there within the Beltway in Washington, D.C. Gentlemen, welcome back. Hey, Matt. Welcome to my fellow space advocates here and let's say abroad, too, because people listen to us abroad. Hey, guys. Good to be back again. We have something very special to present for people in a few minutes, Casey.

Give us a little 20-second tease of this big feature interview that's coming up in the show. But we do have some other things to talk about first. Right. So the big question that we're going to talk about with our interview today is, when did the private space age begin? A lot of people, and I would even say myself included, really think of private space exploration as happening right now, right around us. But Alex McDonald, who is an economist and a historian working out of NASA's Office of the Administrator right now, has published a book about the history of private investment in space exploration. And if you just consider, step back and say,

you know, the action of exploring, learning new things about space, and you apply that to grand observatories and telescopes, you actually trace an interesting history, particularly in the United States, of private investment in space going all the way back to the 18th century. I thought that was a really fascinating insight

into this larger context that we find ourselves now. And we also talk about the role of spaceflight as a concept of signaling our ability and intent and the role of new space in this broader historical context. It's a really fascinating interview. And we talk for a good amount of time, really get into the meat and potatoes of some of this history of private spaceflight. It is a fascinating conversation. I got to listen in, and we'll be getting to that momentarily here. Let's begin, though, with the message we bring you at the top of every one of these shows, which is that the Planetary Society needs you.

We would love to have you as a member. If you're already a member, we thank you. We are grateful you are helping to make this program happen and all of the other terrific work that is underway by the Society. We've missed Giving Tuesday, but you can make it Giving whatever this day happens to be by going to planetary.org slash membership and sort of voting with your credit card or your pocketbook for the kind of space advocacy that Casey and Jason and others at the society lead. It is, we think, important work. And I can tell you that it is clear that they are being very effective in Washington, D.C. And that is something that you can help us further and expand. I know,

Casey, that you've got much bigger plans for the future, but we need that support from people. And this is also a good time to do it because, well, it's the end of the year. It's a nice way to maybe, maybe get yourself some good tax benefits as you support what I believe to be a great organization, the Planetary Society. Again, it's planetary.org slash membership. And as we talk about the closeout of 2017 and our next show, which will be the first Friday in January, of course, what we're hoping to do is sort of present to you the best of or at least a review of 2017. It promises to be a momentous year right through the very end. And we would love to get your questions and topics, your suggestions,

for the kinds of things that we might want to include in that discussion. To get those to us, and we probably won't be able to use all of them, but we sure encourage you to try and get yours in, write to us at planetaryradio at planetary.org. And we will review the stuff that comes in very carefully. And Matt, I just want to add that we don't hope to do this. We will do this. We will be talking and answering your questions. You can also tweet us at Casey Dreyer at PlanRad on Twitter, email us, drop us a comment on our Facebook page. We will take your submissions, answer some of our favorite questions. And if you have any burning issues on space policy,

looking back to 2017 or maybe even ahead, let us know. Casey, you've still got this effort underway to gather support for planetary science, as the Senate considers the budget for 2018. We're still, despite being in fiscal year 2018, we still do not have a budget for the U.S. government for the fiscal year 2018. We are on a continuing resolution, a stopgap measure that expires within about a week of us recording this. Hopefully the government won't shut down. It may.

I think it's pretty possible it will, at least for a little while. But eventually they will have to fund it, and eventually they will have to decide what budget they're going to give to NASA. And we have a proposal from the House that ups NASA's budget, ups the budget for planetary science. We have a proposal from the Senate that cuts both, though it does preserve funding for earth science. So there's good in both. And we're kind of pushing for the best of

all worlds, which I think we can all afford. And we're collecting messages to send to Congress. And we have a petition for that online, planetary.org slash petition 2017. Really easy to fill out. If you haven't done it yet, please do. These really do make a difference, and the time to do it is right now because when they finally announce what they intend to do about the budget, it is basically to change it at that point. The work is happening now behind the scenes. They need to know, particularly those of you in the United States, your senators and congresspeople need to know that you care about

and follow this issue. And we have Matt Renninger, who's our government relations manager here at the Society, who doesn't really come up in the show much, because he's busy on Capitol Hill, literally right now, meeting with these offices who are receiving these messages from their constituents from Planetary Society members, and talking about how important it is to their constituents. So please do it. We follow up for you and we make it easy and it really does make a difference. I heard just today that the Planetary Society year over year has increased its interaction with members of Congress,

Senate and House, by 600%. And if you want to give guys like the other Matt and Casey and Jason a lot more ammunition, well, one good way to do that, other than becoming a member, is to sign this petition. It really does, as we've said many times in the past, it makes a big difference, doesn't it? It really does. Can't emphasize that enough. And we also do, for those of you who are international space advocates, we do have a way for you to send a message to the White House as well. That's on our website at planetary.org slash petition 2017. Everything helps. You know, the future of the Planetary Society is fundamentally up to its members and the public who invest in it. It really does make a difference at many, many levels. We depend on you

as a partner, really, in our activities. So please consider that this month. You mentioned it in passing, without a budget for 2018, we are creeping up on that deadline, which could mean the shutdown of the US government. If that happens, this is so deja vu, how is that going to affect that little piece of what the federal government does called NASA and space exploration, space development? The federal government is currently funded under a continuing resolution, and that ends. When that happens, the federal government is no longer legally allowed to spend money, and that includes NASA. There are provisions within the government that will allow for specific types of spending for issues of vital national interest, but those are really defined very narrowly. So at NASA, basically the only kinds of things that you would be able to continue to pursue would be activities that would be catastrophically detrimental to the United States if you didn't. The last time we had a government shutdown, that included James Webb Space Telescope, which was in a thermal vac test. And if people had just

abandoned it, the entire spacecraft would have been destroyed. And that would have been $8 billion down the tubes. So those activities will continue. But basically, every other activity at NASA will come to a stop until the budget impasse is resolved. Yeah, like they will still continue to monitor and support the International Space Station. Mission control will not walk away from their jobs, right, in that situation. But every other mission, as you said, the vast majority of NASA civil servants, it's not that they just won't be at work. They're forbidden from working, right? That's right.

That's right. That's right. Yeah. They are legally not allowed to step foot on the premises of federal institutions. Those who have federal computers or phones are not allowed to use them. It's a pretty dramatic shutdown. Some of the activities like, you know, we have spacecraft out at Mars and other areas within the solar system. They'll have to basically put those into a holding pattern so you won't be receiving data. You won't be interpreting that data. All of these activities really come to a halt. As I say, it's really quite dramatic.

Yeah, I had a friend of mine who works for the U.S. Geological Survey. And the last shutdown, he had just flown to, I think it was Los Angeles for a science conference. And then the shutdown happened, and he was ordered to immediately buy the first ticket back home, because he was not allowed to be there, even present to represent the USGS during the shutdown. So the government had to pay these like last minute traveling fees for all of their employees anywhere that they were, because they were not allowed to be, quote unquote, working. So it's really disruptive.

And you look at missions like James Webb now or other missions that may not be in as immediate of a situation where if you don't deal with them, they'll, you know, they're not in cryo testing, for example. They'll just sit there and they won't get worked on. And you have launch dates that you're working towards. Parker Solar Probe is supposed to launch in July of next year. Would this impact that launch date? We don't exactly know because we don't know how much margin. And I'll go you one better.

But it's a real possibility. A member of a family that includes a civil servant. My wife works for the Naval Research Laboratory here in Washington, D.C., if the federal government is shut down, not only does she not report to work, but she's not paid for those days. That's basically a pay cut that was unexpected by us at Christmas. So that's another wonderful implication of all of this. Good point. The human side of it, I mean, there are two million civil servants. Good point. The human side of it, I mean, there are 2 million civil servants. It's a mess. And so we really hope this won't happen. I think it's looking more likely it'll happen for at least a couple days, if not longer. But as many of of the focus has not been on the budget right now. It has been on the tax bill currently moving through the U.S. Congress.

There's not many days left to deal with this. I'm just thinking of JPL sending a message up to Curiosity. Hey, buddy, just keep climbing that hill and we'll talk to you when we talk to you. Hold tight. Speaking of that tax bill, which of course is dominating the news, at least here in the United States, and I think even in other parts of the world, we could easily spend an hour, an hour and a half just talking about the ramifications of that bill. In fact, we don't really know everything that's in it. There is at least one thing that you guys already surprised me with, and that is some provisions of this tax bill, which would have a pretty devastating effect on graduate

students in the United States. Yeah, Matt, I'm not used to talking about tax policy as a space advocate. That is just an area that I'm generally happy to leave completely alone, right? And the Planetary Society just normally doesn't do this. But right now, we're tracking this issue that really has an impact on the future health of the scientific community, particularly for planetary science or any science. Also, we have members of the Planetary Society who are graduate students, who are putting in long, long hours and getting paid very, very little and yet still chip in their membership dues. So this is obviously an issue that has much broader implications than just the tax rate. Fundamentally, what we're looking at is graduate students generally, when they go to graduate

school, they themselves don't feel like they're paying tuition. They usually get a small stipend, usually in order to teach, to teach classes, to teach undergraduates, or they're on some sort of a grant, either internal or from the federal government, that pays them on the order of, I think the range is somewhere between $15,000 and $30,000 a year. It really depends on your institution. But tucked away in that, in addition to the stipend, they are technically getting their tuition to the institution covered by that teaching. They don't see any of this money.

It all happens as this invisible transfer of funds from one department to another, but there's still tuition to pay, even though they're teaching or they're working for a scientific research group. The value of that classically has not counted as one's taxable income. It's not part of your income because it makes sense. You don't even see it. It's just this invisible thing. The Republican proposal that has actually passed the House of Representatives, this is not in the Senate version, would change that. It would consider the value of the tuition as part of one's taxable income if you were a graduate student. So that means someone pulling in 22 grand a year

would be taxed as if they were pulling in $70,000 a year, depending on the institution that they went to. Now, the other changes in the tax code, the details of this kind of depends whether you go to a public school or private school. The amount of your tuition, the amount of you, it's offset a little bit by a few other gains they have, but fundamentally, most graduate students would end up paying a lot more

out of their take home pay, which is unchanged, right? So they again, these students make around 20 grand a year, they're working 80 hours a week, if not more. And they never get a raise for their entire period in graduate school. They're not raking in cash here. And so this was a surprise to many people, including us. And this could have real long-term consequences to the future health of these scientific communities. Jason, what would this have meant in your life? I mean, you spent a good part of that life as a grad student. Yeah, it would have made it impossible. It just would not have been an attainable goal for me.

I did not come from a wealthy family, and I took great advantage of the federal programs, and there are many that allow students from lower-income families to attend higher education institutions. Both my wife and I have benefited tremendously from this, and our lives simply wouldn't be possible without these programs. So there's just one facet of the tax bill. Of course, by the time we get to talk again, this may have been resolved. It may have been passed into law. It's moving very quickly. And I just want to put this in some larger context. Why is this important? Why do we care about this?

Why are we following this? Why should you care about this if you're not in graduate school? countries, in order to stay competitive in the future, need to be training incredibly talented and incredibly capable people who are good at, you know, basically abstract symbol manipulation. So your future scientists, your future economics majors, your future business leaders, your future managers, your future, you know, you need to expand into this whole new area and to stay competitive as the world changes, as the world becomes much more competitive broadly within the context of globalization. But also, in order to keep that competition, you need to then invest as a nation into your universe higher education system that trains students to become highly competitive

in a broad global market. But also, you want to make sure that you are maximizing the amount of people. Are you fully taking advantage of your population by pulling them into the system to train them? So can you bring in as many graduate students as possible to train them to be future scientists, engineers, thought leaders, whatever? Or are you going to start closing that off to people who don't have the means to support incredibly high tax rates for themselves? How would that, you know, there's long-term implications based on who you're pulling into this system and then what's going to happen to

our competitiveness to other countries around the world, this is particularly from a US perspective here. If we are basically financially decentivizing people to commit to science, engineering, mathematics, what have you in graduate school. Yeah. In effect, what you do with a policy like this is you shrink the pool of talent from which you're able to select from. And that inherently makes you as a nation less competitive in a global market. So the best and brightest of your talent pool will always rise to the top. And these are skill sets that even if you're not the top 1% of your know, these are skill sets that even if you're not the top 1% of your class, these are skill sets that move out into every aspect of our economy, every aspect of our national security apparatus. It's really, really important to keep this pipeline of training

moving. And if you're shrinking that pool of talent, you're effectively making yourself less competitive in every one of these sectors. All right, guys, as I said, we'll know much more by next month, because of course, the Trump administration and Congress have said the Republicans have said they want to get this passed before Christmas doesn't give them a whole lot of time. In the meantime, it's a good time if you're building a new rocket, to have the guy who basically is the majority owner of Amazon standing behind you. richest person in the world because Amazon has been doing very well this time of year. And I believe his net worth is now over $100 billion, which if you're Blue Origin and he's cashing out, he has said a billion dollars of Amazon stock per year to fund your operations

only gives you now, I guess, a runway of about 100 years to get your stuff together and to get ready to launch. That was just really interesting to me, really profound, really, how much resources Blue Origin has to draw from at a certain level. And we also recently saw that, I think last week, that SpaceX updated some of their filings with the SEC and that they had had raised $450 million earlier this year in terms of financing round, valuing that company at almost $22 billion, which puts it at one of the most valuable

privately held companies in the world, which itself is pretty incredible considering how new they are and how hard of a market they had to break into, which was launching things into space that don't blow up for profit. That's not a busy sector of the economy, as demonstrated by a lot of the history that a lot of our listeners already know. So those were two kind of interesting pieces of news that we saw this week

that really demonstrate, I think, in a lot of ways, the potential that lies ahead of us with these massive opportunities for private investment in space exploration. Hey, Casey, if I could just make one interesting point here as we're getting into this conversation. Only if it's interesting, Jason. I don't take uninteresting. Well, and it depends on who you are as to whether or not this is actually an interesting point. If you're listening to this show, it'll be interesting. Right, yeah.

Yeah, I suspect so. I'm sure I have family members who will not find this interesting at all. But if Jeff Bezos, you said, you know, the $100 billion basically gives Blue Origins a 100-year runway to become a successful, profitable company. Another way of looking at that is with $100 billion, if he spent every penny of it, depending on how you do the accounting, he could almost buy an international space station. Almost. Yeah, that's pretty impressive, actually. I mean, it kind of reminded me of that Citizen Kane moment. He has a lot of options with

what to do with his money. I think this is a pretty good one to invest in something like Blue Origin and to have that. It's an incredible luxury. It also, I think, drives home the real difference between SpaceX and Blue Origin in terms of what they have to do to remain in existence. SpaceX has customers that they have to serve, and they have revenue, and they have to make revenue in order to pay their employees and all of their stuff that they want to do. And fundamentally, they're operating within a market. Right now, Blue Origin is not really operating in a market. They're completely isolated from needs of revenue generation requirements. They're fully funded by their patron, and then they're able to pursue a much quieter and potentially longer-term strategy here because they don't have to chase down income.

There's a subtle difference. These are both technically private space companies, but in some ways, they couldn't be more different in how they have to respond to a market. Yeah, that's starting to change a little bit for Blue Origin. They're starting to pursue some government contracts, both military and civilian, but that's really in the early stages. I don't think they've been selected for any of those contracts yet, but that'll be the next phase of that company. And it'll be interesting to see at that point how much Bezos is willing to continue to invest, or if he wants to see this company really begin to compete. What is that engine? I think it's the BE-4, which might just become very important

to the future of military space in the United States. And Jason, what do you think is driving this current situation that we have such a, I don't know, some people might think new, bold kind of leaps into private space and SpaceX with its reusable rockets and same with Jeff Bezos, I guess, with Blue Origin and their reusable rockets. Is there a fundamental shift that happened to create this or is this a natural outgrowth of something? That's a really intriguing question. When I look over all of the companies that are competing now in this quote unquote, new space arena, the thing that I'm sort of struck by is that these companies

are not really being driven by new technologies in the way that one might expect. I mean, there are certainly new technologies coming about, but they're not really sort of the, I hate using this term, the game-changing technologies that you might expect to be driving this new interest. I think it's really being driven more by the emergence of new markets and new ways of doing business, new contract structures, new ways of structuring businesses, new ways of thinking in terms of systems engineering and project management. I think that it's really an evolution of processes more than technologies that are driving this, which I find fascinating. And Jason, there is evidence of that in the episode of the regular edition of Planetary Radio, the November 29 edition, where we talked to Bob Richards, who's the CEO of Moon Express. And I suspect that he might agree with you, even though they are innovating

in a few important ways. Yeah, no, as I say, there are new technologies that are emerging, but they're not necessarily radically different from what we've seen before. I mean, the rocket equation is still as draconian as it has ever been. And, you know, you still have to create the same amount of thrust out of a rocket engine to defy gravity. That being said, there are a plethora of new companies coming up with new ideas and new ways of using these technologies that are really not radically different from what we've seen previously. Something else that strikes me about it, too, thinking of this, it's not just, as you said, the technology, it's also the market, but it's also the venture capital community is willing to put money into these things, I think has been a significant shift.

You actually have a resource for private capital to invest in areas that I think generally were seen as a way to throw your money away in the past. And that was something that, you know, if you look at some of Elon Musk's history, convincing people to invest in SpaceX early on was a very difficult proposition because rockets have a tendency to explode. And no one had really had a successful company that didn't depend or wasn't primarily a government contractor. Now you have Moon Express and these other deep space industries and planetary resources.

These all have private capital that are apparently willing to invest for long periods of time before they have a return. And that, I think, has also been a significant shift, at least from recent times, that people have this desire to fund these things. Yeah, I think that that's very true. We often argue about the role of government in markets. And this is a really interesting example of watching industry reach a point where it's capable of investing in technologies that are mature enough that you can develop them for the cost of a reasonable business venture as opposed to previous expenditures where you had to have a state-level investment in the development to create a rocket. Well, now SpaceX can do that for an amount of money that is not unreasonable for a single individual to have. That's a radical change over the past 50 years. And it's partially the maturing of the technology, but it's also partially the level of wealth that some of these individuals now have that I think is different than it was 30, 40, 50 years ago. And this is what really nicely helps us segue into my interview with Alex McDonald, because...

Ah, yes. Yes. The very smooth segue. The Andrew Carnegie's of the 21st century. I mean, that's really, you see a strange and interesting parallel that really hasn't been, and Dr. McDonald acknowledges this, hasn't been fully researched yet. But this idea that in the past you had a significant group of very wealthy individuals who were willing to put their name and a significant amount of their wealth into astronomical observatories in the United States. And that really kind of coincided with the Gilded Age

and then faded away to the more current paradigm of significant state investment in space exploration. And now we seem to be not necessarily reverting, but expanding or, you know, I don't want to imply that we're going backwards, but we're going to a point where we now have more options for space exploration. It's not just public money, and it's not just private money. There's kind of this interesting new hybrid that's presenting itself.

And that history of understanding, particularly in the United States, the role of the state in space exploration is a really modern concept. We take it for granted because most of us who are listening to this have only been alive during that period. But the 300 year olds among us will remember a period where it was far beyond any expectation that the public should pay for anything related to this. And I think that's been that's one of the really interesting things. Maybe we should just listen to this interview, because we really get into this history. And we can appreciate that the private space investment, we're actually returning to a tradition in the United States of this more than creating a brand new field. Absolutely.

Well done with that segue. And we will now go into this quite extensive interview, quite comprehensive interview that Casey did, this conversation he had with Alex McDonald just a few days ago. Alex McDonald, thank you for joining me on the Space Policy Edition of Planetary Radio. Thanks, Casey. It's really great to be here. So the classic story about the U.S. role in space exploration is that after Sputnik was launched in 1957, this kicked off this era of government investment in space exploration. We went through the Apollo program, government exploration pulled back, and then we did the shuttle. We kind of brought humans back to low Earth orbit and science kind of trucked along within this constraints. But now we have this brand new era of private

investment coming into spaceflight. We have billionaires like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos dumping their own personal money into space exploration. And now we have this glorious or exciting new future ahead of us. Tell me why that classic narrative is wrong. Well, yeah, I think it's not so much wrong as it is incomplete. What really started me on trying to investigate the economic history of space exploration was in 2004, I was a grad student in economics, and I watched the Spaceship One flight that won the initial Ansari X Prize. And as an economist, I got thinking, what just happened here? Did a bunch of guys just build a spacecraft in their garage?

Of course, it turned out it's not quite that simple. It was the leading or one of the leading aerospace engineers in the US, Bert Rutan, who'd built the vehicle. And of course, it wasn't really funded in the garage. It was funded by Paul Allen at about $30 million. But it led me to think, how long have individuals been funding space exploration essentially out of their own pocket? That led to looking at all the different private sector projects I could find that were economically significant in the history of space exploration. And the ones that you come across that are the most economically significant are actually at this time, not really these current ones that we're seeing, although they're very exciting as well. They're actually large astronomical observatories in the late 19th century, which were funded by, in many respects, the kind of Elon Musk's and Jeff Bezos's of their days,

Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller. And they were funding, in many cases, billion-dollar observatories or billion-dollar equivalents if you convert the costs to modern-day dollar terms. And so that really, for me at least, puts into a different context what we're seeing today. It's not that we're seeing a new phenomenon emerging with these private sector actors, but we're actually seeing the reemergence of a trend that long predated NASA and was actually the original economic force, if you will, for considered space exploration at the time, which was, you know, collecting photons coming from the universe. Was there an established role of government for scientific observation of the universe in the United States at this period? Right. So, yeah, there's this really fascinating history of the first governmental support for space exploration activity, as you describe it, right?

You know, collecting photons and trying to discover something new about the universe in the cosmos above, so to speak. The first telescopes that came into the country were essentially imported by individuals. You know, John Winthrop, an early governor of Massachusetts, his heirs would be the first to import some of the large telescopes and you'd have individuals who would be studying the heavens. But then something happened around the transits of Venus in the late 18th century. And there's one particular case, the second transit of Venus from that era was in 1769. This, of course, at the time was, in many respects, a type of a space race. And the reason it was a space race was that if you could calculate how long it took for Venus to transit across the sun at different points on the earth, you would then see it transit for different lengths of time. And you could then

use those differences to calculate the distance of the earth to the sun and thereby calculate the size of the solar system. And so governments around the world, monarchs really, were trying to win this prestigious race to calculate the size of the solar system and using transitive Venus as a method. And America at this point, colonial America, decides that it's going to enter this race, so to speak. And the very first legislation that we have, evidence of giving for exploratory and scientific astronomical research, was the Pennsylvania legislature, which gives money to support a number of astronomers to go and observe the transit of Venus from a number of different spots along the eastern seaboard of the colonies.

That then leads to the first collected transactions of the American Philosophical Society, which when that particular document makes its way over to Europe, the European science community really sees that as a signal and as a sign of American intellectual development. The astronomers who were involved with this, particularly David Rittenhouse, was actually held up as one of the great Americans by Thomas Jefferson. When Jefferson was asked to describe who the three great living Americans were, the three great living Americans who spoke to the new independent nature of the United States of America, he named three individuals. He named Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, and he named the astronomer David Rittenhouse. Something I really love about your book and its treatment, particularly in the early context of American investment space exploration,

is these recurring themes that just sound so familiar to anyone who's really followed the more recent era of space exploration. And you mentioned it right there, the idea of national prestige and finding, you know, the oper opportunity presented by some celestial event that drives some sort of investment, either public or private, and the country or really, as you point out in your book, really intrinsically motivated, highly passionate individuals find an opportunity to leverage that celestial event to get investment for their passion that then drives this idea of prestige. And this, you know, there's nothing new about that, it seems like going back even to the

18th century. Well, that's exactly right. And you've described it, you know, particularly well, because that's the that's the bottom line for looking at these kind of 200 years that the book looks at. But there's a relatively simple model at play, a relatively simple economic model at least, which is that intrinsically motivated individuals who have a passion for exploring the heavens, for whatever particular psychological reason, want to go do that. If they have their own funds and their own source of support, they will often self-finance their own astronomical observatories or, in some people's cases, their own rocket companies. And if they don't have their own resources, well, then they need to enter into an exchange with somebody in order to receive those resources to pursue their goal.

And they will do exchanges with many different types of institutions. They will do exchanges with governmental institutions. They will do exchanges with military institutions. They will do exchanges with commercial institutions. The particular type of exchange value that has been, at least as far as I can tell, the most robust, the most robust across centuries, is this signaling value, this idea that in achieving something first or achieving something particularly difficult, you can signal to the world, really, a vector of characteristics,

your ability to take on large technological projects and vector of characteristics, your ability to take on large technological projects and succeed at them, your ability to muster resources and organize them. And then that is a very valuable thing. That was really the principal value of Sputnik. It signaled to the world a capability in the Soviet Union that the world was not really aware of. And it was arguably the principal political value of the Apollo program as well. It signaled that the U.S. was able to achieve something that no one else in the world was able to achieve. And frankly, to this day, no one has achieved still. So it still serves as a very credible signal and is arguably one of the reasons why countries around the world are increasingly looking

at the possibility of lunar landings because it has attained that type of prestige signal. Signaling comes in at a really deep level throughout your book, and I think that was actually one of the most interesting aspects of the book. And you make a really good argument about the difference between the idea of prestige as the driver of investment in space exploration and the idea of signaling, as signaling is actually the real framework or a really useful framework to look at this. So can you talk about, tease apart the differences here between signaling and prestige, where I think most people think about the prestige aspect. Right. So the traditional idea of prestige actually kind of

comes from the word prestidigitation, right? This kind of idea of an illusion. And it was kind of used politically around Napoleon's hundred day effort, because it seemed that he was able to just, through almost illusion and magic, get a huge amount of support. And so that word maintained its use. But the challenge with it is that it suggests a kind of ability to just impress people with almost illusory activities. That it's not really valuable, right? That at the core of it is a type of illusory value. Signaling is something very different. Signaling is actually a concept that's used in economics and in biology, which is essentially the idea that through costly action, you can credibly transmit information. In economics, this is often looked to in terms of

higher education, that that's a costly signal to send to the market. And in biology, it's often used in terms of describing the utility of the peacock's tail. You know, the reason that peacocks have these, or at least male peacocks, have these very elaborate and fancy tails is not because they're helpful in terms of gathering resources, but actually they're so superfluously expensive in terms of energy that they signal that this is a particularly healthy specimen. And so signals are used in cases of asymmetric information, cases where not everyone has access to the same information. And you want to signal the type of characteristics that you think are positive and that you think other people should essentially know about. Space exploration serves as a good signal because it is costly. It is difficult to make and it's difficult to fake.

And so what that means is that people can look to the types of achievements in space as essentially sources of credible information. The example that I often give is if you can imagine yourself in 1957 in, say, Ghana or in Thailand. This is pre-Jet age, so you've probably never been to the Soviet Union or to the United States. Any information that you get about these countries comes essentially through newspapers or radio broadcasts, but these things can be relatively easily propagandized. So you don't necessarily really know much about these countries, but if you can actually visibly see something that is orbiting the earth, or you can pick up

the radio transmission from that vehicle, you know something meaningful about that country, especially if one of them has achieved something that there has not. And so it took on a very significant importance in terms of alliances. But the benefit that the signaling framework has over something like Prestige is that it can also explain these quirks of space policy history that things like Prestige have a difficult time explaining. One of the best examples of this is Kennedy's offer to Khrushchev in their meeting in Vienna to actually do a moon landing cooperatively. If the explanation is just that the objective of space exploration is Prestige, then it's hard to understand why he would do that. But if you understand that

its actual value is signaling because of its costliness, then it's easier to see that what Kennedy was really trying to do there was to signal through something that was particularly costly, a genuine willingness to cooperate. And we've seen that ability of space exploration to serve as a signal in different ways used many times. Another example is, of course, the decision to pursue the International Space Station. The International Space Station essentially became a cooperation project between the United States and its allies and what had previously been the Soviet Union had become Russia. It was a credible commitment, a credible signal of willingness to cooperate between what had once been two competing superpowers to a new future of cooperation. And because it was costly, it served as an effective signal. So I think that's kind of one of the benefits of the difference between signaling and prestige.

Do you think signaling has the fact that it is expensive? Just a postulator to this a little bit here. Does that actually help keep the cost of space exploration high? Is that a requirement that it has to be expensive? And so there's a lot of maybe subtle motivations to keep the cost high, particularly in the US system? Well, that's a very interesting question. And I refer to it somewhat in the book, although relatively obliquely, because of course, you know, that's a particularly difficult question to examine empirically. But what I think is fairly obvious

is that if the cost of space exploration stays high, then it's going to be very hard for the people with the intrinsic motivations to go explore space to do more of that. And so what I think is very interesting is that there isn't necessarily a incentive for, let's say, institutions or governments that want to use space exploration primarily as a signaling device to try and reduce the cost of space access and to increase the volume of space exploration activities. But the intrinsic motivation of the individuals who want to go explore space and do more of that themselves, that's the real driver for bringing down the cost of space access.

This is probably why you see reusability being a real focus on the private investment side more than government investment side historically. I think that's probably one reason. Another reason, of course, is that government programs have actually gone through many decades of funding reusable rocket programs and have actually had a hard time with it. Yeah, and we shouldn't ignore the space shuttle. It was a reusable spacecraft, just not an affordable reusable spacecraft. Right, and there were many other attempted programs, the X-33 program, right?

So it's not just as simple as the motivations, but I think it's really important to look at the motivations nonetheless, because unless you have a motivation to decrease the cost of space access, you are probably unlikely to do so given its complexity and difficulty. cost of space access, you are probably unlikely to do so given its complexity and difficulty. We've defined signaling, which I think our listeners should just kind of keep in mind, it's going to come up as a recurring theme here throughout the rest of our discussion. But let's jump back a few hundred years to early US post-colonial history now. So let's move into observatories and maybe lay out this idea and the role of astronomical observatories and the popular consciousness at the time, particularly in relationship to the continent, to Europe and its role with those? And then

what was the US's role and understanding of the value of astronomical observatories at this period? So here we get to possibly my favorite story in the whole history of 19th century American space exploration, which is the story of the first political space advocate in the United States, which was the sixth president, John Quincy Adams. And John Quincy Adams was such an advocate for science and the development of astronomy in the U.S. that he used his inaugural address to Congress to advocate for a federal astronomical observatory. What year was this? This was in the 1820. He advocated for astronomy specifically because he believed it was a signal of a nation's capabilities.

And it was a signal of the willingness of its people to contribute to science. And he noted that in Europe, there were literally dozens of sophisticated astronomical observatories. At the time that he gives the speech, there were none in the US. So he gives a very impassioned speech to Congress, suggests that this become something that they appropriate funds for, and Congress thoroughly rejects him. Congress, in fact, was so unamused by his idea

of what became derided as lighthouses in the sky. He used the term lighthouses of the sky, but his phrase was willfully misinterpreted. It was so derided that decades later they would still use that as a phrase to kind of insult a particular project that they thought did not have merit for public tax dollars. He only served, of course, one term as president, but he had another opportunity because he was the only president who actually returned to the House of Congress. Or I should say he was the only president to return to the House of Representatives after having been president because he considered serving constituents directly to be a higher honor than just being an executive. So when he was back in the House of Representatives, he served as chair of the committee on the Smithson bequest. and the House of Representatives, he served as chair of the committee on the Smithson bequest.

And the Smithson bequest was essentially a multi-billion dollar gift from a British chemist. He left all of his money for the progress of knowledge and the diffusion of that knowledge amongst people to the U.S. And there was a big debate about what to do with this funding. Essentially, John Quincy Adams convinced Congress to use that funding to set up a permanent endowment that would perpetually be used to fund new institutions that would advance knowledge. And that became the Smithsonian. And there's a particularly rich interest in the fact that the first funding for rocketry development that Robert Goddard ever

got was from the Smithsonian. So there's this direct connection to the founding institutions of American space exploration that goes from John Quincy Adams right to Robert Goddard, and of course, right to the present day. And while John Quincy Adams was not successful in getting an astronomical observatory set up in the Smithson at the start, he started something that was essentially thought of as the observatory movement. And this happens in the 1840s, when across the country, a number of different cities set up civic observatories. And these are observatories that are funded by the individual citizens of these cities in order to have their own astronomical observatory. Particularly interesting is that they're not all doing this for scientific reasons. They're doing this because they want their own access to best-in-class telescopes to explore the heavens. The very best example of this is the Cincinnati Observatory, and this has a very colorful history.

A man with a marvelously 19th century name of Ormsby McKnight Mitchell comes to town and he has what are called lantern slides, which are the equivalent of kind of a PowerPoint deck today. And he gives a series of lectures about the wonders of the heavens, showing these pictures that had been drawings from what had been seen through the doorpat Observatory over in the Russian Empire. And he makes a call to the citizens of Cincinnati that essentially says, we have to show the czar of all the Russians that here in a free Republican country, a small-r Republican, of course, a free Republican country, that the people will become patrons of science that will rival any money that he could ever raise through his feudalist model. They try to raise enough money to build the largest telescope in the world in Cincinnati.

They succeed in raising enough money for the second largest telescope in the world. And they set it up in Cincinnati. And for a brief period of time, the citizens of Cincinnati had personal access. Whoever had put their subscription money in, essentially like a Kickstarter program in the 19th century, whoever had given in their funds were able to look through this very, very large telescope and explore the heavens themselves. I'd like to come back to Cincinnati, but let's jump back even to John Quincy Adams, because I think that's a really fascinating example of this repeated story of space exploration politics, which was lofty. I mean, you quote really nicely some of

the speeches from John Quincy Adams and also his later reports when he was in the House working on the Smithson request. But the rhetoric, I mean, you could just replace telescopes with sending humans into space in those speeches, and it would read like a Kennedy speech, or it would read like a Ronald Reagan speech or any other kind of modern day presidential declaration of the importance of space exploration and the importance of scientific exploration. And then same sort of reactionary from Congress of no way, we're not going to pony up for that. This dynamic of what is the public's role in investing in these high-cost signaling activities that really do advance scientific capability, but also, particularly, I'd say, back in the early days of the American system, there's just such a different conception of what the role of government was for this, right? Absolutely, yeah. Back in the mid-19th century, the idea that the United States government would fund the institutions of science for reasons other than essentially national defense was not an idea that was readily accepted. There were two governmental observatories, but

they were within the military, the West Point Academy Observatory and the U.S. Naval Observatory. They were there essentially to assist with navigational problems and with coastal survey issues because those had direct application to national defense. The idea that you would have governmental support of advanced science technology for broader economic and social reasons really has to wait until the mid-20th century, with Vannevar Bush, of course, being the kind of primary proponent of that idea of establishing that source of support for science technology within the federal government as a perpetual and reoccurring set of programs.

That would take a long time to mature. In the mid-19th century, none of that was really established or appreciated, and so it really was entirely reliant on the patronage of wealthy individuals and the patronage essentially of individual citizens within the cities that set up these observatories. And it happened in a number of cities. It wasn't just Cincinnati. As soon as the citizens of Boston had heard that the citizens of Cincinnati had set up a large observatory, well, they were not going to be outdone. And they rapidly raised enough money to build the largest telescope in the world. The same thing happened in Detroit, in Albany. It happened in states. The Alabama legislature appropriated funds for what would have been the largest telescope in

the world at the time, but it had to be actually canceled on account of the Civil War. The way in which space exploration institutions as astronomical observatories were funded in the U.S. really actually had a very strong grassroots element. It started with individuals who were passionate about space exploration. They would find other people within the local communities who wanted to also invest in these projects. And occasionally they would also, as I would say, the wealth inequality increased throughout the 19th century, they would go to the particularly wealthy individuals who had very large sums of money.

And it was that kind of transition of patronage that allowed the very largest observatories to emerge. It was fascinating reading your accounts, particularly of the civic observatories, particularly starting with Cincinnati. As an employee at a public nonprofit that is funded by individual small donors, I was seeing, resonating with the amount of work it takes to do that, but also with the same motivation of getting people excited

or leveraging kind of this existing public level of support for astronomy and astronomy as itself as signaling virtue, you know, part of this elitist elite culture of a respectable way to pursue an intellectual effort at the time. And that's something I wanted to actually have you talk about, too. Why observatories at this point in early American history? Why were people willing to spend so much money on observatories? Why not other scientific institutions? Why not other efforts? What about the culture allowed this to be that source of effort and funds? Yeah, that's a really good question. And frankly, I think that's a question deserving its own independent PhD in social history. Well, you can sum it up in three minutes then pretty easily then, right? Right. I would say that one of the underapp the patterns and see the kind of wondrous objects they could see, they would pretty unilaterally see that as also being evidence of, you know, God's handiwork. And in their words, you can look at the writings of Benjamin Franklin,

who would always essentially quote Isaac Newton, who himself saw these types of patterns in the skies as being evidence of a deity. This actually was a very strong source of support all through the 19th century. And you can see individuals who would often write about their spiritual motivations for astronomy. And in that sense, astronomy has a unique position in the sense that it is an observational science that everyone could participate in. Buying new instruments allows people just to explore that a little bit further and also to be subjected particularly to wonder. That was one motivation. Another motivation was obviously the physicality of these objects. They were physical monuments and physical buildings. And in many respects, that actually became a problem in a number of cases where the patrons of these observatories, the Albany Observatory being a particularly notable

example, would spend so much money on the building before they'd even decided what instruments they were going to buy. And then they'd have to redesign the whole building to now accommodate the scientific instruments, because they didn't actually ask the scientists what they thought would be valuable until very late in the process. Another example of the monumental nature of these observatories is one of the later ones of James Lick, who essentially decided that he was going to make this his personal monument. And he is buried underneath the Lick Observatory. That was part of his stipulation of his providing essentially about a billion dollars in today's terms of funding for that observatory. And there was another force that I think is worth thinking about. And it's particularly important to try to remember that in the 19th century, when people were looking out into the heavens, into the nearby planets, the plurality of worlds hypothesis was something that people pretty much believed was true.

When they looked at the moon in the 1840s, people thought it would be inhabited. There was a particular set of books by a writer named Reverend Dick, who wrote about essentially the multiplicity of living beings that were expected to be in our near environment, on the moon, on Mars, on Venus, on Jupiter. All these places were expected to be inhabited. The very famous case of the Great Moon Hoax really shows how broadly applicable this belief was. And this came from a newspaper, the New York Sun, which decided to increase its circulation by printing essentially a hoax story about a very large observatory in South Africa manned by John Herschel having discovered living beings on the moon. discovered living beings on the moon. And when they printed this story, it was widely believed. So widely believed that many of John Herschel, who was a real astronomer, he would receive these notes from his European colleagues wondering if the story coming out of New York was true. Because people really believed that the solar system was inhabited. That was actually motivation all the way up until the early part of the 20th century. You know, until we

actually started to investigate the nearby planets with robotic probes, the general public tended to believe that these planets would have some form of life. That belief in looking for life was also a core motivation. Percival Lowell and his search for the canals on Mars being only the most famous example. Would you say this was a unique confluence that happened in America at this point? Or was this happening elsewhere in the world around in the 19th and 20th century as well? The particular phenomena of I would say civic observatories, communities coming together to fund their own telescopes, national observatories, that was quite unique. And I would also say that large philanthropic funding for telescopes was also unique in the United States. What you saw elsewhere in the world was usually one of two phenomena. Either the monarch or the state would fund a state observatory,

which is what the Royal Greenwich Observatory was, or the Paris Observatory in France, or the Polkhovo Observatory in Russia. Or you would have kind of what are referred to as the grand amateurs. And these are people who had their own money and would kind of pursue their investigation of the heavens at their own leisure on their own estate. That was much more common in the rest of the world. The phenomena of endowed philanthropic institutions for space exploration really was quite unique in the United States in the 19th century. Would you say there was an observatory gap? Was there the sense that the United States had to

catch up with European capability in the early 1800s? Was that a cognizant? Were they aware of that? Was that a pitch that people were making? Yeah, I mean, that's a great point. I really should have used that phrase in the book. Now you're making me regret that I didn't. You know, there was a sense. I mean, that's certainly exactly what John Quincy Adams was talking about. I mean, he didn't use that term exactly, but he would count the number of observatories that other people had, and he would make references to reports that people would make about the Russian observatories and the French observatories. And he would really try to impassion people with this notion that, you know, the United States needs to catch up in its contributions to science. By the late 19th century, however,

I would say that that gap had fully closed. And by the late 19th century, the U.S. observatories were not unilaterally necessarily, you know, the first and foremost in all cases in the world, but they were certainly among the most well-financed and the most scientifically productive. So in the early 1800s, your book describes the first investments in observatories and telescopes seemed to happen at universities mainly through, I'd say, relatively small scale through very personal passions of key professors or presidents. And then you identify something that I had never heard of. And I think probably most of our listeners would be unfamiliar with as an inflection point of being the Philadelphia High School Observatory.

And I've never thought of that as an inflection point as you describe it in the history of American space exploration. Yeah, I mean, it's a fascinating example. Essentially, the citizens of Philadelphia had gotten some tax back from the government, and they kind of got together to figure out what they were going to do with it. And they decided they were going to build an observatory and attach it to the Philadelphia Central High School. And it was an inflection point for a couple of reasons. One, it was kind of the first example of a broader community coming together to essentially use their tax dollars to build an institution of space exploration, in this case, a large telescope. All the previous

ones, as you'd said, had been really part of universities. This was civic. This was a broader community than just an educational institution. It was also alection point because they imported a German refractor and actually took a lot of scientific input in the design of the observatory. This was something that hadn't really been done. Usually the president of the university would kind of design his own telescope. He'd go off personally to Europe and he'd go buy the instruments and come back and that would be the observatory. This had input from members of the American Philosophical Society who gave suggestions

as to what could be done to make this most useful. And it was an inflected point in another matter, which is this kind of this series of connections that you find amongst these institutions. At the Philadelphia Central High School was educated a young Charles Yerkes. And Charles Yerkes would later go on to endow the largest refractor in the history of the world at that time, in the 1880s, when he gave the money to George L. Rahel to build the Yerkes Observatory. Now, he wasn't necessarily a particularly avid supporter of science. The reason he gave his funding for the observatory is largely accepted to have been that he was a particularly unpopular robber baron and he needed to ameliorate his reputation. But, you know, it's hard not to imagine that potentially his early observations of the skies in the Philadelphia High School

Observatory might have nudged him in one direction towards funding a telescope. The example in Cincinnati was just such an interesting and vivid way of doing things. It's such a, to me, it's just really struck such an American concept at the time, and particularly in contrast to the czar funded, you know, all of these comparisons they made to these autocratic investments in Europe. And you mentioned this quote, but I want to quote exactly as you had in the book from Ormsby McKnight Mitchell. Yeah, Ormsby is my favorite name. Here's his quote. And so he went around, he was literally walking through the streets of Cincinnati,

right? 25 bucks for a share of this observatory. And he needed to raise something like $7,500, which was quite a bit of money at that time. He engaged this new burgeoning middle and middle upper class society that was growing as a consequence of the growth of the American economy. And his pitch was, this is a quote from him, I am determined to show the autocrat of all of the Russians that an obscure individual in this wilderness city in a Republican country can raise here more money by voluntary gift in behalf of science than His Majesty can raise in the same way throughout his whole domains. That's the Kickstarter program. And even the $25 subscription, that would only kick in if everybody, if they met their goal. That is literally the Kickstarter example here.

And here it is in, what, like 1843, happening in Cincinnati. And they raised the money. They did. They raised the money to build the second largest telescope in the world. Yeah, that is one of my favorite quotes in the whole book. to telescope in the world. Yeah, that is one of my favorite quotes in the whole book. Because it's so symbolic of the type of civic passion that was driving some of these projects. It's just kind of wonderful, really, to think about the type of life of the mind that these guys would have been living back then. 1840 Cincinnati, you know, the sixth largest city in the US at the time, was kind of a

boomtown on the frontier. And they decided that they were going to try to build up a world-class institution of space exploration, and they effectively did. And again, one of these connections, it was John Quincy Adams, who makes the last major speech of his life at the observatory's inauguration. And this idea, too, that the role of science as the signal that we are establishing ourselves as a country and as a civic polity, really, and as a grown up or as a mature nation, this is a part of what we do. But because we're not autocrats, we then depend on individuals to fund this. I mean, just even having that expectation is kind of uplifting in a way to see people thinking like that. Like, well, what do we do as an established community? Well, we fund science, and we fund particularly a relatively esoteric branch of science that has no direct feedback or research and development consequence into our daily lives, but we want to observe the heavens. Yeah, that's exactly right. And of course, that is the model that exists today. Exactly. And you just carry that forward and you just see

the same styles of rhetoric, the same motivations and the same intrinsic motivation or personal passions, almost religiosity to this belief that this is our role and this is what we should do as a society. Right. And we have that today not just because of individual benefactors of private sector projects, but because the largest patrons of space exploration in the history of the world are the American taxpayers. And that model really was established, in my mind, in that kind of Cincinnati Observatory moment. We have, as you pointed out, a number of civic communities went and followed a similar model and made these observatories. A lot of them had a hard time ultimately paying for the science once they built them. Just like any, again, same old story, easier to get the funds to build something than it is to operate and maintain it. But let's enter this world, this new era of rich individual patrons using the observatory as a signal itself to either

rehabilitate their image or to demonstrate their role in history. As you said, Lick is monument. When did that begin to change? You started to move away from this group civic subscription to an individual bequest to these observatories. Right. Yeah, you start to see the shift in the late 19th century as you enter the Gilded Age, essentially. You start to really see it around the 1870s. And you start to see a number of characters kind of emerge on that scene. You have the Lick Observatory in 1876. Lick is the richest man in California

and makes his money in property speculation before the gold rush. Great time to be speculating on property values. He is writing his will, and he decides that he wants a monument. And he first thinks he's going to build maybe the world's largest pyramid in the middle of downtown San Francisco. And people get on onto him and say, maybe that's not such a great idea. How about, say some astronomers,

the world's first mountaintop observatory? He says, can we be buried underneath it? Absolutely, sir. If you pay for it, you can be buried wherever you want. And so Lick funds, at that time, the most expensive telescope in the world. He spends 17.5% of his entire estate on that project.

If the richest man in California today gave the same portion of his estate to a single project space exploration, you'd be looking at about a $9 billion project. The amount of money that Lick gave was roughly equivalent to about a billion dollars in the share of GDP today. He really kicks off this trend, which then continues with the McCormick Observatory at the University of Virginia, and then starts reaching its apex with the three observatories of George Ellery Hale. George Ellery Hale himself was kind of a beneficiary of the Gilded Age. He was the son of an elevator magnate in Chicago. He was fascinated by solar astronomy in particular. And at a very, very young age, he becomes a professor at the University of Chicago and works with the president of the university to get Charles Yerkes to give enough money for this very, very large refractor, largest refractor in the world at the University of Chicago, creating the Yerkes Observatory.

Halen goes on to build two other successive world-largest telescopes, Mount Wilson, funded by Andrew Carnegie, then the Palomar Observatory, funded by the John D. Rockefeller Philanthropic Organization, General Education Fund. And so at that point, as you need to keep buying bigger and bigger telescopes, you need to get more and more money. By late 19th century, early 20th century, the place you need to go for that funding is wealthy individuals and their philanthropic organizations. Once you get up to the multi hundreds of millions, you're talking about an actual spacecraft equivalent at this point. And

in terms of just pure cost, that's astonishing to see that. But also, as you point out, the complexity of designing these incredibly large telescopes, it's a really interesting comparison to really ultimately see that you're having, when we talk about now, oh, can an individual fund a spacecraft? Well, if they want to spend a billion dollars, which Jeff Bezos is actually doing every year at this point, you can actually get quite a bit out of that. And there's real historical precedent for that. I mean, hundreds of millions of dollars, these observatories, right?

Yeah, absolutely. And that really for me is the economic core of this idea of the long space age because it suggests that there's not just kind of motivational continuity, there's economic continuity as well. People were funding multi-hundred million dollar space exploration projects a hundred years before NASA even existed. They weren't doing it very often. I mean, that's the other side of this, right? That these types of multi-hundred million dollar and billion dollar projects, they didn't come along every single year. Billion dollar project

in the Lick Observatory. There's a billion dollar project certainly in the Wilson Observatory, sorry, the Mount Wilson Observatory. But these are a couple decades apart. And in between, you've only got a few multi-hundred million dollar observatories. But it certainly is within the realm of historical precedent for there to be privately funded multi-hundred million dollar space exploration projects. And as the cost of space access goes down, and as the cost of space satellites, space instruments, and research access goes down and as the cost of space, space satellites, space instruments, and research also goes down, I think it's going to be very plausible to imagine private individuals funding space science projects that are not just derivative, but actually first in the way that

the Palomar Observatory and the Wilson Observatory were first of their kind as well. I mean, just now we're seeing that Yuri Milner, the current one of the biggest patrons of SpaceX investment at this moment, is studying a mission, private mission to Enceladus, which a billionaire could maybe feasibly attempt to do for hundreds of millions of dollars. Just strikes me to see this history. It's so much in keeping with the same tradition here. tradition here. And it actually gives me a lot of hope, too, with space science, because I think recently we've seen a lot of investment in rocketry. And we'll get more to rockets here with Goddard here in just a minute. But space science itself has always seemed harder and harder to actually get personal investment from because of the same problems that you've had with that you mentioned with building

observatories. The science itself is actually less exciting to fund because it's not as visible. It's more interesting to build the thing, the physical object that everyone can see and connect with, and harder to get people to dole out the funding for that. There is something I do want to touch on before we move on to Goddard, which is the role of inequality. And you brought this up in your book a little bit, and you just mentioned it now. And as the Gilded Age basically entered into American history, you saw, would you say, an increase in the number of patrons, a single, giving large amounts of money to observatories. And you can kind of connect that to today, where you're seeing a very large growth in economic inequality. And is it a coincidence or would you say there's a correlation between the fact that we now have multiple private billionaire funded efforts or even just the Uri Milner effort that I just mentioned?

Are these related? When we see large amounts of private investment in space, is that itself a sign of growing economic inequality? Well, I tend to think of it from a pretty statistical perspective. So the more you're concentrating wealth in fewer hands, or you should say that the wealth concentration that happens in a certain percentage of society, the more likely it is that one of those individuals who has an interest in space exploration activities is going to be able to fund it. And so as you're concentrating wealth within a particular segment, it's just kind of a natural outcome that those who already have that existing interest in space exploration are just going to be able to fund more of it and be able to fund it more extensively. And so we certainly

saw that in the late 19th century, and we're seeing it now. The Uri Milner one, I think that's a really great example in terms of kind of someone who's starting to fund the science aspect, right, not just funding the rocketry development part, but really trying to fund some of the science missions. And I kind of take a little bit of particular happiness out of that one because, of course, you know, Pete Worden, who's now the chairman of the Breakthrough Foundation, was the guy who originally brought me to NASA.

He was interested in my research because this was my doctoral dissertation, and he was interested, you know, Alex, you know, figure out how, you know, we can get more money for the space exploration thing. I figured we can figure out these commercial models. And after doing all this research, I kind of said, hey, you know, Pete, I got to say, it looks like the money's in billionaires. And so I like to think that Pete kind of took that advice to heart and has managed to find himself a billionaire. Yeah, do you get like a 1% cut for that? Yeah, no finder's fee within the federal government.

Let's move on to, let's move into the 20th century. So we start to see a decline in the 20th century of observatories funded by individuals, and you start to see it more shift to a consortium model. Is that a driver just of that they're getting more and more expensive, that they're even pushing the limits of a very wealthy single person's ability to fund these institutions? I think that's part of it. I think the other major one is that around the Second World War, you have the emergence of that Vannevar Bush science, the endless frontier

model of government funded R&D and science. By the end of the Second World War, you now have a wide variety of institutions, Aura that's been set up on the astronomy side that are now really taking the lead in funding new observatories. And you don't really see the emergence of privately-funded observatories at a major scale, really, until the Keck Observatories again in the 1980s. And now, where did Robert Goddard fit into this

concept of private investment, intrinsic motivation, but also this alignment of priorities with a broader national thing? He seems to really strike me as having a foot in both of the historical angle of a single individual finding wealthy patrons, but also beginning to engage in public finance of this research for more practical means. Yeah, so Robert Goddard is the father of liquid fuel rocketry in the US. He is one of these amazing characters who has a vision as a teenager in what's called his cherry tree moment. He's chopping a cherry tree on his family farm. And he has a vision of a spacecraft that can travel to Mars,

about 16 at a time. At that moment, he decides to dedicate his life to the development of spaceflight technology. And he stays committed to that vision for the rest of his life. From an economics perspective, you know, that's really an inelastic supply of labor. That inelastic supply of labor by dedicated individuals is really the core and originating resource for pursuing these kind of ideas in my mind. But he also doesn't have enough money to really take that beyond a certain level. So he needs to enter into relationships with patrons. After getting his PhD and getting a postdoc at Princeton, he writes off to the Smithsonian saying that he's got this idea for a long range rocket. At the time, it's actually a solid-fuel rocket concept,

and I would like some funding to go develop it. And Smithsonian writes back and actually provides him some funding and also provides him some connections to the military, which by the late 1910s is starting to gear up for the First World War. And Robert Goddard actually gets funding from the U.S. Army Signal Corps to try to develop this long-range bombardment rocket. And he actually moves out to the Mount Wilson workshop in Pasadena where he works on his concept so that he could be as far away from the Germans as possible

and makes a fair amount of progress. But he doesn't really make enough progress to kind of lead to an operational vehicle so he goes back to Massachusetts where he's from and continues to work now on his liquid fuel vehicle because he'd noticed through the First World War that his solid concept didn't really work out. There he starts to do experiments funded by the university that he was a professor of, Clark University. In one particular case, he launches the rocket and it explodes. And this sends the reporters coming to figure out what happened. This story that gets written up of his secret development lab makes its way to Charles Lindbergh and Harry Guggenheim,

who read about this and had already been talking about what the next frontier of flight was going to be. And that really takes Goddard into what becomes the major patronage relationship of his life, which is with the Guggenheim family. And the Guggenheim family funds about half of his life, which is with the Guggenheim family. And the Guggenheim family funds about half of his research. Overall, he had about $40 million in terms of R&D funding. About half of that came from the Guggenheims. But he also believed that the real source of money was going to have to be the military. And so he also spent his whole life working to try and develop relations with military patrons, and he ultimately ends his life, actually, while working for the U.S. Navy in the Second World War

to try to develop jet-assisted takeoff rockets. In summary, he's really one of these entrepreneurial characters who is dedicated to space exploration for his whole life and tries to essentially get funding wherever he can, and the places where he finds the most funding are from dedicated private individuals, the Guggenheim family and Charles Lindbergh, and from the U.S. military. So do you think that Goddard was kind of the last era for a while? Did it basically become completely consumed by public investment after this period of

basically at the beginning of what we consider, you know, the maybe the space, active space exploration age in the Cold War and this whole transition of what the role of government was in terms of R&D in the United States, and particularly with its relation to a signaling value, as you go into it at a really nice length in your book, about having to establish technological and capability preeminence over the entire world. Was Goddard the last of this kind for the rest of the 20th century? Well, he wasn't actually. He's the last one in my book because I focus on digging into his history

because he was the most prominent of any of the individuals. But there were others. The other one who's particularly interesting is Edmund Sawyer, who was the head of something called Crescent Engineering. I haven't written anything up on this, but I did a bunch of other research for the book, aside from what made it into the book. And he was one of the most interesting characters

because he was funding his own rocket development efforts in the Mojave Desert, in exactly the kind of place where we're seeing a lot of the commercial space development today. And he was doing that in the early part of the 20th century. That was on the West Coast. On the East Coast, you had the American Interplanetary Society, which was at the start a collection of essentially science fiction enthusiasts who got together to fund a new society, a private society, to try and advance spaceflight. That society becomes the American Rocket Society, which then combines with the American Institute for Aviation to become the

AIAA. And so even something like the AIAA has a legacy that dates all the way back to these private societies of individuals who are trying to advance space exploration on their own resources, because out of the American Rock Society also came the very first space startup, Reaction Motors Incorporated, which received venture capital funding from one of the Rockefeller family in the 1940s. And so all of these kind of themes that we think are so new today, they really have echoes in the past. And you had people trying in various different places at various different levels to advance the technology with the private resources at hand. We're kind of at the period where most of our listeners are most familiar with, which is,

you know, the beginning of the classic government funded space age, Cold War space age, and as you put it in your book, the Apollo anomaly of just orders of magnitude of more funding coming into this field for a very different set of purposes. Well, actually, no, not really. Actually, that different, a magnified importance of the same reasons. The consequence of Apollo, obviously, was really disrupting a certain balance, right? And we had this huge amount of money come in and then a large amount of that money left,

but not all of it. Compared to the past, there is a massive amount of public investment still out there for space exploration, for space science. And you talk about this in the context of negative signaling. Let's just mention negative signaling as a really, maybe at this point, a very useful thing to consider in the context of what we already talked about with signaling. Why do we still have all this funding for space, particularly human spaceflight? Yeah, that's really great. You're picking up on all my favorite concepts. I do my best. Negative signaling is essentially kind of summarized by the old colloquial phrase, a luxury once acquired becomes a necessity, right? Once you've started to do something,

that is quite costly. If you stop doing that thing, that will also send a signal. It'll send a signal to the world or your community that you no longer can afford to do that, or that you had a reason to stop doing it, but now what was the reason? That concept of signaling came in directly with Nixon's decision to extend the space shuttle. When you look at the records and the memos from why they decided to continue with the space shuttle, he actually reportedly said to one of the NASA officials who was at the meeting with him that even if this wasn't a good investment, we would have to continue to do it anyways, because people are now in space and are going to continue to be in space and we'd best be part of

it. And so at that point, removing support from that endeavor would send a negative signal to the world that the United States was no longer committed to leadership. And so we're now in this position, you know, in general, where the world has developed spacefaring, space exploration, human spaceflight capabilities. That capability set is actually pretty widely dispersed. It's dispersed in people and the countries that pursue the International Space Station. It's also extant in China countries that pursue the International Space Station. It's also extant in China, and it's increasingly becoming extant in the private sector. And so it's going to continue. And so then the question is, will we be part of that?

Whoever we is, whether it's a nation or an individual or a group, will we be part of that? And if one is part of it already and one removes oneself from it, then that sends a negative signal. And I think that is a quite important phenomena in terms of explaining why we continue to pursue this. Because you have individuals who have created the technology and are going to continue to pursue it. And they will pursue it wherever they can find the support and the funding. And so are we going to support it and pursue it ourselves? the support and the funding. And so are we going to support it and pursue it ourselves? Is there a reason that the idea of private space has become more, at least increased in awareness in public consciousness now? Is that a consequence purely of policy decisions that government decided

to blow on those embers or bring them into the fold through the COTS program? Or is this a natural consequence of overall declines in public funding for space and the same intrinsic motivators still acting and just forcing a new world to develop? Why are we hearing about this more now than we have in the past? Or is that really just a perception? Do you even agree with that? Well, I think what we're actually seeing is the result of kind of cultural importance of space exploration in the mid-20th century and some of the private societies that sprang up around that. When you really trace back the personal motivations of

Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, Elon will trace it back to being inspired by the early NASA programs, and Jeff Bezos will trace it back to being inspired by the High Frontier and the space movement that originated around Jared O'Neill. So those were really outcomes of that early space exploration program. And now as you have more concentrated wealth in some of the individuals

who are passionate about that project, and as some of the technologies now have been transferred to a wider set of society. And as some of these technologies are becoming cheaper and more easy to implement, you now have an increasing ability for individuals to enact their own space programs. And so those people who've been inspired by all the space exploration activities in the United States over the last 50 years are now having the ability to just do exactly that. I think that's one of the most exciting parts of it. It's a combination of wealth being in the right places for some of these individuals and the technology becoming increasingly accessible. I'm just going to give you one more

quote out of your book that I really liked at the very end. You say that the American space community would do well to accept this historical fact, and that was the rise of new institutions and the transformations of old ones, and perhaps was the rise of new institutions and the transformations of old ones, and perhaps spend less time and energy worrying about how to preserve and rehabilitate old institutions, and more effort on encouraging the emergence of new institutions of American space exploration. And that really resonated with me as an argument. And, you know, obviously, in the context of this long historical story of the American relationship with space exploration writ large, but also understanding

that sometimes you can create, and what we're starting to see now is this new, I think, ecosystem of opportunity for both private and public funding to really encapsulate and to really pull out this energy of these intrinsically motivated people. So I don't really have a question around that. I just wanted to point that out. That was a really just interesting way to consider this long history. So I don't know if you wanted to expand on that a little bit. Do you see a lot of people trying to return to this old Apollo era? You know, I don't think it's ever going to come back, but you may differ on this. Well, you know, actually, these days, I would say I don't so much, you know, I mean, I wrote the

book really over almost an embarrassing long period of time, almost a decade, because it was my doctoral dissertation, and I got kind of put into a book, I would say I saw more of that desire to kind of return to the past, so to speak, over half a decade ago. Today, I think pretty much people are really trying to figure out, you know, how to combine these different historical forces, the passion and the drive, and in some cases, the funding of intrinsically motivated individuals, as well as the force of public institutions that implement the will and the desire of American people through their taxes. How do we combine those things? And I think that idea, as you mentioned, of the kind of the regular creation of new institutions as being an important

feature of American space history is something that we really should keep in mind and we should be on the lookout for. How do we create some of the new ones? Because, you know, you're right, it really is this ecosystem. American space exploration has been the product, you know, not just of a few institutions, but of a multiplicity of people and projects, not just over decades, but over centuries. And they've all evolved over time into a network of different public and private interests and institutions and nodes. And that sometimes the private sector has been the strongest influence within the network,

such as in the late 19th century. And at other times, the public sector has been dominant, such as in the mid-20th century. And so the question isn't really, you know, which one is more important or which would be more dominant, since that will always change over time with external circumstances. The real question is, how do we ensure that we're constantly adding new nodes to that network, and that we're increasing the connections within it, and that we're working to ensure its overall robustness. What are you going to be paying attention to going forward in terms of this new, old era of private investment with space, and particularly NASA's role with it? In the next 15-20 years, do you see markets emerging? Or do you see a constant

relationship between public and private? Do you think they're able to be independent from each other at this point? Well, I don't think we'll ever be completely independent. I mean, I think one of the interesting phenomena will be, if we have private capabilities for human spaceflight, how do people end up using those capabilities? There's the obvious case of suborbital space activities, you activities, sometimes called space tourism. And I think that will be a significant change. I think watching how society adapts to that particular space product, should it emerge, will be very interesting because the

potential exists for there to be very rapidly more, quote unquote, private sector astronauts than traditional mass astronauts. And that can happen very quickly if the flight race we were talking about emerged. Now, they may not, but with Blue Origin's capabilities and Virgin Galactic's flights, it's certainly within the realm of plausibility. In thinking about orbital human spaceflight, there are a bunch of missions out there that people don't talk about as much because they don't have the same type of science return or the same type of contribution to development. Missions like a human flyby of Apophis in 2029, right?

You'd only be having that flyby for literally seconds. But it's flying within the geobelt. The delta V required to get out there for that is not that high. If you had a small satellite in the right place, you could take a picture of a human vehicle flying by that asteroid. Maybe it might not make sense to have a government agency pursue that type of mission, but maybe some individual, if they can actually access human spaceflight capabilities, would want to go do that. Other missions, like missions to orbit Venus, also kind of fall into that category. It may not quite meet the metrics

required for public funding, but if individuals have their own spacecraft and they can pay for them and launch them and modify them, you're going to have the potential to do things that are outside of the usual kind of debate channels of Moon, Mars, etc. And so I think that's, for me, one of the most interesting and exciting potential futures that we might see emerge out of this long history. Alex, I want to thank you for joining us on Space Policy Edition today. Well, thanks, Casey. It's been a real pleasure. Alexander McDonald is a senior economic advisor at the Office of the Administrator at NASA and the author of The Long Space Age. Great conversation, Casey. If you talk to him, please tell Alex, give him our kudos and our gratitude

once again. And what is the book once again? The book is The Long Space Age, and it's available on Amazon or wherever you find great space policy books. Really recommend it. I thought it was just a fascinating book, as you could tell from my conversation with him. Really sparked a lot of thought on my end, and I really appreciate space policy books that do that. Yeah, it's a really great book. And not only do I want to add to the plug, but I think it's interesting to note that this book is being very roundly read in space policy circles in DC. So if you want to know what all the movers and shakers have been reading in DC regarding space policy, this is one of the books you should definitely pick up.

And you've got a month to get that reading done before we come back to you with the next edition of the Space Policy Edition of Planetary Radio. It'll be the first Friday in January. A reminder that we will be reviewing the year that was, 2017, and we want your input. We want your questions. We want your topics. Send them to us at planetaryradio at planetary.org. Or as Casey said earlier in the show, you can send them to us via Twitter. You can even hire a Falcon 9 and have them dropped into our office in an aeroshell if you like.

But I do recommend email and Twitter over that. Gentlemen, thank you very much. Happiest of holidays to you. It has been a delight as always. Well, you as well, Matt. And I would be remiss if I did not mention happy anniversary. Congratulations on 15 years of doing Planetary Radio. That's just amazing work and really pleased to be a part of the new generation of Planetary radio spinoffs as part of the Space Policy Edition.

So congratulations, Matt. Thank you very much, Casey. And indeed, you are a part of it. Casey Dreyer, the director of space policy for the Planetary Society, his colleague Jason Callahan, his and mine. Jason, our space policy advisor in the Beltway in Washington, D.C., which is what this monthly series revolves around. Plenty of time still, as you hear this, I bet, to become a member of the Planetary Society and join this group that is bringing you this program and doing such good work in Washington and in space exploration really around the world and beyond the world.

Again, gentlemen, thank you, and all of you out there, thank you for listening. We'll talk to you in January.