Alexander MacDonald advises on national space strategy development and private-sector space activities and is an expert on the economic history of space exploration. He received his doctorate in economic and social history from the University of Oxford and his masters in economics from the University of British Columbia. He is an economist with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) which is managed for NASA by the California Institute of Technology, and is currently assigned to serve as Senior Economic Advisor with NASA. He was awarded the AIAA History Manuscript Award in 2016 for this work and lives in Washington, DC.
MacDonald makes a fascinating argument juxtaposing the relationship of post-Sputnik space activities with related efforts between the early-nineteenth century and the present. It is a remarkably new and different argument. -Roger D. Launius, Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum A groundbreaking book that turns the conventional telling of space history on its head. MacDonald convincingly shows that entrepreneurs and benefactors appeared first, alongside government support, not last. -Howard McCurdy, author of Space and the American Imagination MacDonald's book is a landmark work that lays out our multi-century human space expansion course. --S. Pete Worden, Former NASA Ames Center Director, now Chairman, Breakthrough Prize Foundation MacDonald has written a provocative new history of the Long Space Age that invites us to rethink both the motivations for space exploration and its shifting sources of its support. Based on considerable original economic analysis, he elegantly shows that the so-called new era of private spaceflight has a precedent dating back over a century. -Asif Siddiqi, Fordham University