The Long Space Age

Alexander MacDonald, an economist and economic historian now working for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, declares his scholarly motivation at the outset: to construct a prehistory of the current moment in space flight, marked by the rise of private space patrons such as Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos. He argues, in effect, that the government-dominated Cold War space boom is not the norm and that American efforts are returning to an old pattern of private investment and patronage. He annexes the history of U.S. astronomy, particularly the observatory construction boom in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—at first small telescopes at the town and college levels but later giant refractors and reflectors funded by Gilded Age patrons. To MacDonald, these observatories conducted “space exploration,” in the sense that looking out into the universe is the same as using machines and humans to gather information beyond the atmosphere. That argument seems anachronistic, although perhaps not completely wrong. It certainly gives the book a teleological cast—the inevitable unfolding of the thesis he set out to demonstrate

Anachronism · Boom · Colonialism · Economic history · Flourishing · Political science · Politics · Space (punctuation) · Space Age · Classics · History · History and Developments in Astronomy · Law · Philosophy · Space exploration and regulation · Space Science and Extraterrestrial Life