Steve Levitt

speaker

962 appearances 8 recordings 1 series first heard Dec 2024 last heard 31 Jul

Steve Levitt’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 5 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 2.

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Freakonomics Radio · 683. In the New Space Race, Who Makes the Rules? · 31 Jul 2026 podcast

It states that space belongs to everyone and that no country will place nuclear weapons in orbit.

118 countries ratified it, including every major space-faring nation.

And then the treaty-making slowed down.

The last big treaty was ratified in 1984, even though there are a lot more people making use of space now than there were then, including private actors.

I asked Hoffman why the law stopped keeping up.

So I'm curious.

So let's say China's got a satellite and for some reason it's maybe going to crash into SpaceX's satellite.

Does someone in China call up someone at SpaceX and say, hey, we've got to do something about these orbits?

Or how does that actually work?

After the break, orbital data centers may sound like science fiction, but the history of spaceflight has been influenced by fiction from the beginning.

Back to my conversation with Alex McDonald.

He's a former NASA economist who studied the history of private spaceflight.

I was shocked to learn reading your research that Robert Goddard, the father of modern rocketry, he got about half of his funding from private sources, especially from the Guggenheims.

And that's despite the fact that what he was doing with rockets had such obvious military applications that I would have thought he would have been just swimming in government money devoted to defense.

It's interesting hearing you talk because you don't talk like the typical economists.

You like stories.

You seem like a little bit of a romantic, which fits in with the idea that you wanted to be an astronaut.

Yeah.

Do you think that the rich history of science fiction stories about people traveling to the moon or to Mars, do you think those have served an important role or do you see them as kind of secondary to the technology?

So you're essentially saying Robert Goddard didn't really care if he got paid for these rockets.

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