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  • The Long Space Age: The Economic Origins of Space Exploration from Colonial America to the Cold War by Alexander MacDonald
  • Thomas C. Lassman (bio)
The Long Space Age: The Economic Origins of Space Exploration from Colonial America to the Cold War. By Alexander MacDonald. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2017. Pp. 272. Hardcover $35.

After the triumph of the Apollo lunar program in the late 1960s, public enthusiasm and political support for spaceflight ebbed. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) downsized and confined its human spaceflight activities to low earth orbit as budgets shrank and the Cold War drew to a close. Without a replacement for the post-Apollo space shuttle, a successful but costly and accident-prone technology retired in 2011, NASA has relied instead on the Russians to ferry American astronauts into space, and more recently it has seen its role and status diminished even further as a new paradigm takes hold. Billionaire entrepreneurs have seized the initiative and now stand on the cusp of revolutionizing the technology and economics of spaceflight. So the story goes, according to Alexander MacDonald, a historian and space policy expert who sets out to upend what he calls the conventional narrative history of American space exploration.

The era of large, government-funded spaceflight programs embodied by NASA's Cold War mission, MacDonald argues, is the exception, not the rule. It did not define the Space Age. A longer historical perspective, dating back to the earliest days of the American republic, reveals that wealthy individuals—the antecedents of today's technology entrepreneurs—eagerly pursued and bankrolled the exploration of space. The recent exploits of Elon Musk and Jeffrey Bezos are not new but rather part and parcel of this broader historical trend. Three pivotal movements in American space exploration structure the book. Chapters 1 and 2 discuss the emergence and evolution of privately funded astronomical observatories from the early nineteenth century through the middle of the twentieth century. Correlating expenditures across time, MacDonald demonstrates the extent to which these early investigative efforts compared in scale and scope to NASA's programmatic initiatives during the Cold War. Chapter 3 carries the same argument forward through the experience of visionary rocket pioneer Robert Goddard. Although he tapped wealthy individuals for funds to pay for his research, Goddard also looked to the military departments for resources, a precursor to the type of public-private partnership that flourished after Sputnik. Chapter 4 explicates the waning of private-sector initiative in the face of overwhelming political will and government expansion that drove the economics of the Cold War space race. The accumulation of national prestige and status through the execution of massive, public financed projects, however, still bore some similarities to the motivations of those wealthy benefactors who had funded the observatory movement years earlier.

MacDonald demonstrates the pervasiveness and resilience of institutional [End Page 484] patterns of private-sector behavior in space exploration across two centuries of American history. It is a useful exercise that broadens our understanding of the subject, but it has one significant weakness. There is no discussion or analysis of the twenty-first-century privatization of spaceflight or the leading luminaries of the movement that prompted MacDonald to write the book in the first place. The history of the Cold War space race is "overdetermined" and subject to a "cacophony" of viewpoints that obscure long-term trends, he writes (pp. 160–61), but that recent history, complex and messy as it may be, still reveals much more about current spaceflight activities than MacDonald is willing to concede. Put another way, is it necessary to take a long view of the Space Age to explain how Elon Musk, Jeffrey Bezos, and other technology entrepreneurs are giving NASA and its contractors a run for their money?

MacDonald surely could highlight Musk's motivations and their connections to earlier antecedents. He has, for example, publicly proclaimed an ambitious vision for humans to leave the planet and colonize other worlds. MacDonald could also argue that Musk resembles the nineteenth-century capitalist. Like Andrew Carnegie in steel, he founded commercial enterprises that rely on inputs of capital and labor to build rockets and automobiles...

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