Why NASA Hired a Chief Economist
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Who is Alexander MacDonald and why was he appointed NASA’s first chief economist?
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Hello and welcome to another episode of the All Thoughts Podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway.
And I'm Joe Weisenthal.
Joe, have you ever met anyone at a party and you start, you know, you ask them the standard question, what it is that they actually do.
Yeah.
And you just get a response that kind of blows your mind. It's something that you've never even thought of before. First
of all, can I say My favorite question at parties is what do you do? P I've heard that they know
some people look down on the fascinating. They
look
down as they're like,
ask me about my hopes and dreams. I don't care. I don't care. I don't care. I want to know what you do. No, I I do. Like, uh oh, where do you live? Uh, whatever. Who care? I want to know what you do. I mean, look, in some instances, maybe people don't want to talk about it, but I figure people devote a big chunk of their lives to work. That's a pretty good icebreaker. So we need to renormalize that. And Absolutely. And as podcast hosts, we're always looking for interesting people.
That's right. And sometimes you meet them at parties. This person that we're gonna be speaking to, we actually met at our party, our tenure anniversary party. Someone else brought them and I was introduced to him and I said, What is it? What is it that you actually do? And the answer that came back was I was NASA's first chief economist.
Amazing. Sold. Have you ever heard
of that before?
I would've I would have known I mean No, I I definitely would have never heard of that before. I mean, I guess I'm not surprised in some sense I'll say the one sense that I'm not surprised that NASA had a chief economist, which is like Economists seem to sort of be in every organization these days. They have a lot of tools in their toolkit that can be applied to a lot of things. They're pretty good with statistical analysis, et cetera. But then also, you know But
this is stats in space.
Well then the other thing is, you know, I know that there's growing interest in the commercial application of space. And so satellites are another are one area. Obviously, defense. People talk about asteroid mining. I don't know if we'll ever see that in our lifetimes, but I know that that's a thing people are interested in. So although I would not have necessarily thought it, you know, I could so I guess I'm not totally surprised that NASA's like, all right, let's bring in an economist in.
Well, I was pretty surprised. I guess I'd never thought about it either. But it turns out that not only does this role exist, but it sits at the sort of intersection of, I guess, a lot of public and private investment in space exploration. And we've talked about this before, this idea that NASA has perhaps been ceding a lot of territory in many ways to private capital, SpaceX, especially. We've done tons. tons of industrial policy episodes at this point and what the benefits are of government investment versus again private capital. Episode. And so I'm very excited to talk space economics. But Let's do it. Truly the perfect guest. We're going to be speaking with Alex McDonald. He served as NASA's first chief economist, as I said, and he is now a senior associate at the Aerospace Security Project at CSIS, the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
Alex, thank you so much for coming on AllBots.
Thank you so much. It's a pleasure to be here.
Thanks for coming to our party too. Glad too. Oh,
good party. party i enjoyed it thank you I enjoyed it. Thank you. Awesome.
awesome excellent so obvious question first i suppose what does a chief economist at nasa actually do
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
Who is Alexander MacDonald and why was he appointed NASA’s first chief economist?
0:00–4:56
2
How does the chief economist advise NASA on emerging markets and investment decisions?
4:56–11:56
3
Why did NASA create a chief economist position in the early 2000s?
11:56–18:54
4
How are private companies reshaping NASA’s funding and procurement strategy?
18:54–25:42
5
What does NASA’s biennial economic‑impact report reveal about the agency’s spending across the United States?
25:42–32:02
6
What are the economic challenges and opportunities of the Artemis lunar‑return program?
32:02–38:57
7
Could orbital data‑center constellations become a viable commercial space business?
38:57–45:39
8
How does international law govern ownership and commercial use of lunar resources?
45:39–50:28
Speakers
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