Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Space Policy Edition: What does NASA need with an economist?

Episode Date: June 6, 2025

Former NASA Chief Economist Akhil Rao explains why NASA needs economic expertise to navigate the complex—and often misunderstood—market forces that will determine the success or failure of its private partnerships. As NASA relies ever more on commercial companies to enable its own exploration efforts, it is imperative, Rao believes, to provide clear-eyed perspectives that highlight the challenges and solutions required to reach success. And why NASA puts itself at risk for pursuing faith-based program investments after dissolving the strategy and economics team at the agency a few months ago. Discover more at: https://www.planetary.org/planetary-radio/space-economy-akhil-raoSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Welcome to the Space Policy edition of Planetary Radio. I'm Casey Dreier, the Chief of Space Policy here at the Planetary Society. We have a great guest this month, Akhil Rao, who was for a brief tenure, the Chief Economist at NASA, Professor of Economics, and specialized in a variety of economic analyses for I think some pretty interesting things in space. Akhil's insights, particularly with orbital debris, as a similar analogy to how humans share limited and finite resources, his work has been connecting it to the idea of shared water resources, really helped spark this interesting discussion about the idea of analogy and how value can be gained by applying the right

type of analogies to areas that are pretty strange, you know, space. But also, I think a lot of the pitfalls possible with that. We also talk about perhaps more relevantly, the fact that his prior role at NASA now no longer exists. It was one of the jobs that were ended by the incoming Trump administration, along with a number of other people providing independent analysis and insight for the Administrator's office. We talk about again the role of economists at NASA and ideally how they want to be used. This idea of saying, not know if this can't happen but how can something happen? Maybe if what NASA needs to do if it really wants to rely on the private sector to provide key services do you

have a healthy market? And we also have a nice discussion about the idea of who is forecasting the economic futures of space and what some of those may have to gain from it. Before we have that conversation, I want to first mention the fact that the Planetary Society, my organization that is making this show you're listening to right now, is a member-supported, independent organization. What does that mean? That means that we don't take government money. That means we don't take big corporate money. The Planetary Society relies on individuals to exist.

That is a unique place to be, particularly these days where we don't have to be shy about voicing our concerns, but also voicing our passions for the things that we care about space science and exploration, planetary defense, the search for life, we get to say what we believe in, because we are enabled by you and supporters like you. I hope you become a member if you are not already at planetary.org slash join. And as you listen to this, if you're listening to this roughly when it came out, we're actually fundraising for my program space policy right now you can donate this program enables all the incredible data analysis this show the work that we do our government relations in Washington, DC, representing an independent voice when it comes to space policy. That's at planetary.org slash take action. You can find out how to support us.

If you've already done so, thank you so much. Really appreciate it. And now Dr. Akhil Rao. Akhil Rao, thank you so much for coming to the space policy edition this month. I'm happy to have you. Thanks for having me. I'm happy to be here. In your last job, you were briefly the acting chief economist at NASA and you had worked

in the office of what was it strategy, technology and policy? Technology, policy and strategy, very close. I always, Bavia will, as I'm sure will start me for that, I always mix that one up, but the you were part of this team working to analyze and provide expert policy and economic analysis, working with the chief economist at NASA as well. Tell me what that job and the intent was behind having economists at NASA, and what were you trying to achieve there? I think this is probably a question, like you mentioned, Bavio will have perhaps a different view. We did not overlap at OTPs. So Bavio was the associate administrator before I joined OTPs and then after I joined, I joined about the same time as Charity Whedon did. And so, I say that

just to say that I am not going to speak to what the intent was at the creation of the rule. But I think really the idea was that as NASA is engaging more and more with the, let's say the commercial sector, commercial markets more broadly, is trying to encourage the creation of a space economy outside of what NASA funds itself, it seemed like it would be useful to have people who study markets, who think a lot about markets and economic efficiency involved in providing advice to the administrator. And so Alex McDonald, my predecessor as chief economist was the administrator's senior most economic advisor. So when the administrator

needs to understand, you know, how much are markets, I don't know, reacting to the latest event that happened that is relevant to space. Alex was the lead person in explaining what those impacts were and how that related to NASA's interests. So I started as a research economist at OTPs. And so I worked very closely with Alex. I was sort of one of his his back office people if you could think of it that way right so as the administrator facing advisor you know he would go and talk to people you know including the administrator about what they should be paying attention to and how they should be interpreting things and I would be one of the people who was

supporting him with analytical notes or work or things of that nature. So not just the chief economist, right, because it's an OTPs position. And so others in OTPs as well, when they needed economic, let's say, insight, I was the person who was there to provide that. So you're a trained economist. What did you see were common, if you can even broadly say that, what were common misperceptions that you often had to correct or jump in or provide context for within the space agency broadly? I would say there are many, but they all

kind of vary in the details. The thing that I think is common across all of them is maybe philosophically, NASA is not an economics agency, right? Like NASA is a science and technology agency. It does R&D. It does missions. It sends people to space. It is not an agency that is known for hiring lots of economists, for having lots of people who are, like you said, trained economists involved in the process. It's just not what it does. And so I would say that many of the misperceptions stemmed from what I would call a lay understanding of economics as opposed to a more sophisticated practitioner's understanding or the understanding

of someone who is in the field. So let me give you a couple of examples here. One is that when we talk about commercial space, and I think this is maybe the most common misperception, not just at NASA, but elsewhere in the space sector. When we talk about commercial space, when we talk about the new space era, many people, I think, view that as an era

in which there are non-government actors on both the supply side, so providing the services, providing the goods, whatever they are, and on the demand side. So purchasing those services and goods. And I would say that that's not entirely true, or at least not in a way that is useful to think about, right? There are people who are purely commercial entities who purchase satellites or launches or whatever your preferred space service or good is. But for the most part, the new space era that we've seen in let's say the last 15, 20 years

has more been about the commercialization of the supply side. So new commercial providers of launches of satellites of what have you, then it has been about the demand side. So that's, I think the first kind of big piece, right? It's just thinking about what is even happening here. Like very popular perception, I think, the first kind of big piece, right? Is just thinking about what is even happening here. Like very popular perception, I think, that both supply and demand are commercializing. And I would say that supply is commercializing much more than demand is commercialized.

We're still seeing sort of early indications of what demand commercialization might look like. The other big thing, I think, is in thinking about prices, maybe more in terms of costs than in terms of market dynamics. And so what I mean by that is, if you look at launch costs, for example, SpaceX has clearly driven the cost of launching a satellite or launching a payload much lower than it was, let's say, 30 years ago. As a result, they are able to launch many more things than people were launching 30 years ago.

But that doesn't mean that the prices that people pay have fallen commensurately. In fact, there's a recent article that Dr. Moon Kim at NASA published recently about how prices for NASA have not actually gone down in, I think his sample was starting in 2006. But so since about 2006, prices haven't really gone down, if anything, they've gone up by a little bit over inflation. So a little bit higher than the rate of inflation. And this, you know, he argues in the article, this has to do with the market dynamics around launch services pricing. And so not about whether or not the provider can do it at a lower cost. The question

is whether you can get the provider to offer you a better price. And so that I think is another big sort of misperception, right? That like, when you have commercial actors involved, they will necessarily drive prices down because they also drive costs down. And that's not true, they may drive costs down, but whether prices go down or not depends a lot on how they interact with other providers and with customers in the market. Is that a function just on the supply side?

I think that's really a fascinating way to put this. I mean, the cost is still a lot. I mean, it's cheaper, but it's still a lot of money. I mean, like a cheap rocket from SpaceX, I mean, the cost is still a lot. I mean, it's cheaper, but it's still a lot of money. I mean, like a cheap rocket from SpaceX, I guess, is $60 million, which most people can't afford. But it's interesting to me, because it's also this point that companies won't lower the price to the monopsolistic,

is that the right word, purchaser, and that if they don't have to, there's not enough competition. Is it a function of not having enough competition? Is it just a limited pool? If you're only having a reform on the supply side and not on the demand and that you have a government purchaser of this,

overall, you don't seem to have a bigger market necessarily. You're kind of competing for roughly the same share. Is that kind of why you get this lack of price savings being passed along to the purchaser? I think you're on the right track there. I think- You'll be able to correct me lots on my poor understanding of economics,

so feel free to do so. So you raise, I think, exactly the right points. I would maybe combine them a bit differently, right? And so maybe taking a step back and thinking about high level, right? So Monopoly, everyone's familiar with this, I think for the board game, right? There's a single seller. The sort of other side of that coin is a monopsony, which is a single buyer. And so monopsony show up in all kinds of places. There, I would say,

probably one of the more popular areas of research in labor economics, let's say over the last 10 years, is in the effects of monopsony and how in different labor markets you may only have essentially one firm that is employing people because when you're in a labor market, workers are the supply side and people hiring workers are the demand side. So monopsony is, I would say, fairly well studied in general. But in general, what's weird about monopsony, I think, relative to the space case, is that monopsony get cheaper prices. They are able to exploit their power as the sole purchaser in whatever the notion of the relevant market is to their advantage. And so when we look at some of the research

that's been coming out over the last decade about monopsony in labor markets, the thinking there, the weight of the evidence is that monopsonistic firms pay their employees less than a competitive market would result in them getting paid. That I think is very at odds with the experience that we have had in space, especially

NASA's experience there. And I think that this is a function of, like you said, the lack of competition. I think that that's huge. That is, I would say, if you had to pick one thing at zeroth order that you would put on a sticker that you're plastering around town, it's lack of competition, right? You don't get competitive prices when you don't have competitive markets, you can't have competitive markets when you don't have competitors, plural. So that is a big part. I think the mystery here is why NASA, you know, if you take MoonCamp's article as it is, then why has NASA not been able to get those those benefits? And I think that this is because the US government space

enterprise, NASA included is also in this weird position of doing industrial policy and of trying to maintain a certain number of providers of trying to not squeeze providers for every possible dollar that they can get out of them. There is also this notion that perhaps you want to maybe pay a little more than you otherwise would because you want to make sure that these providers don't go bankrupt.

But my suspicion is that there's some interaction of these things, right? Of the number of competitors in the market, of the sort of standing goal to preserve a capability domestically, and perhaps the way that government contractors negotiate, government folks negotiate contracts, perhaps there is something at the intersection

of those things that is not generating the price benefits. But again, if you had to pin me down on, you know, pick one thing, what is the one thing that you would point to, I would say it's competition. You point out something that I think I always go back to it, this idea that let's just keep it focused on NASA for this. But you can argue same thing with Department of Defense and their procurement of launch in particular, that there is a bifurcation of their goals, that there is a pretty explicit policy saying that the role of these agencies is

to foster and sustain the commercial and industrial base in the United States for these, which means you can't squeeze people at the same time. But then there's just this common expectation. I mean, this idea, efficiency and lower cost generally translates to fewer people being employed. And that tends to be at odds with a lot of the political dynamics behind the support for NASA

activities and so forth. So you can't have a perfectly rational, at least you can't optimize a feel like on that one thing of being cost, yet that's kind of always pitched as the main idea, which is why I think there's this idea that beyond this, well, then there's this whole private market that I'll just handle and be more efficient.

But there's no one really buying this, right? I mean, there's, so, I mean, this whole idea of markets in space has been, I'd say again, I'm not an economist, but it seems like there's like a lot of faith-based projection into that sphere. Indeed. And okay, good, a real economist can say that.

I am an economist and I agree. And I always tend to, I can, my framing of this, the way I think about it is that there was a lot of people who may have been sold a vision of the future or embraced a vision of the future that hasn't happened. And they're, the way that they can now project it forward is this new yet unproven that hasn't disappointed them yet development that will just be better and more efficient

and more able to do all the things about bringing humanity into space and so forth and so on, despite the fact that there seems to be literally no obvious economic motivation or market to do so. And as a consequence, it seems like this gets translated into policy then at the same time, which may then ultimately, as we kind of talked about, undermine the very initiative behind it.

Where do you see the level of discourse, let's start with this, in terms of how people talk more broadly about the space economy such that it is at this point? That's a very large question. So I'll try to cut it up into chunks and answer it hopefully reasonably well. So I think one of the big things that I see in the discourse that I have seen for some time and I expect to continue seeing for some time yet is what I would call a hangover of the 2010s. So in the 2010s, interest rates were very low for macroeconomic factors that have nothing to do with space.

And there was a lot of investment money chasing the potential of outsized returns. There was also in the 2010s this interesting sort of narrative that I think didn't hit space quite as hard, but was very popular elsewhere and maybe affected some space-oriented investors. And this is the narrative around network effects. So if you remember in the 2010s, what the sort of startup and venture investing landscape was like in the 2010s, I joined a startup that was doing machine learning things, you know, AI before we were calling it AI and, you

know, we were trying to raise money and do all the things that startups try to do. There was, I think, a real belief that you would be able to spend a lot of money upfront, and then you get all these different users into your service. And then they would be really sticky there, and they wouldn't want to leave, and they would stay. And so that's great and all. But if you translate that into investment, it meant that you were constantly going back to your investors and telling them that you needed more money so that you could scale up more. And that if you

did scale up, then you would be in this super dominant, let's not say monopolist, but rarefied market position. This is like the Facebook or Uber or the Exactly. We work tried to do, right? Exactly, exactly. Right? And you know, some of them succeeded better than others.

Fine, whatever, that's neither here nor there. But I think what that meant for investors thinking about like space was they were already, I would say in the mindset that, yes, of course, we will have to spend a lot of money up front. There will be some scale. The scale will come on the back end. It is okay if we don't see returns for the immediate future. We'll keep pouring money into it. And, you know, eventually as a function of how much money we pour into it, we will receive outsized returns. And I would say that that is

part of what explains some of the types of companies that you saw very active in kind of the discourse in the 2010s, right? So like startups whose goal was to mine an asteroid, right? You can see all the elements of this story there, right? Where there's these big upfront costs and once you've eaten these big upfront costs on the other end, there will be a massive payoff. And you know, in the short run, there probably won't be many revenues, but, you know, you're doing something very ambitious and large. And so even though network effects aren't there, you're still kind of in the same mindset of like, ah, we got to scale up.

And so it's, it's okay to do that. And it's okay to not see returns in the short run. That changed quite a bit in the 2020s. And so now what I see more of from space companies is more pressure for one to get near-term returns, near-term revenues, and less interest from investors, I think, in pitches that are, how should I say this, distant future returns, right?

Like it's great that you want to mine an asteroid but unless you're going to be bringing it back and earning money off of it in the next five to ten years, like that is not as investable as, for example, a hypersonic weapons testbed that is also a launch vehicle because the testbed function will start generating DOD revenues very quickly. And so I've seen in the space sector this shift from focusing on these outsize returns, distant future type stuff, to nearer returns often with a defense or national security angle. And that's partly because defense and national security customers actually do pay the bills, right? Like they,

you will invoice them and they will pay you. And that is that is very good. Whereas hypothetical future people who may or may not want platinum from an asteroid. I guess we don't know yet whether they will pay. Is it can you basically say that any startup space company will inevitably optimize towards D.O.D. revenue stream? Is that kind of like the inevitable outcome of it, despite their rhetoric or ambition? I mean, I think unless we see money get much cheaper

with very low interest rates again, and I do not anticipate seeing that at least for the next decade, I would say that yes, for many space companies, they will find themselves subject to pressures that make them optimize for a DOD customer. Maybe not their only customer, but they will almost surely begin to take the DOD much more seriously as a

customer as they start looking for revenues. Well, it's also the only part of government that's growing. It seems I mean, it seems to be at the current moment that we're talking right? Like, yes, nearing a trillion dollars of annual spending. So yeah, your money, that's where you go. You go where it's for sure. That's exactly right. That's right.

It's the sector that's growing. It's the sector where you can have an ambitious hardware project and there is some customer at the other end who will pay even for intermediate progress, who is interested in seeing the technology advanced for its own sake. Just many, many of these factors, I think,

align quite nicely for national security customers. Is this where NASA could step in and provide an alternative pathway? And is this, in a sense, what the ideal representation of this effort that you were part of and within NASA of trying to create and foster a commercial space industry that you're trying to create that specific incentive to also have things that are optimized towards civil space needs. Yeah, I think the short answer is yes. I think it could, you know, whether it does or not is a higher question.

Separate part of the question. Exactly. We'll get to that part of the question. But it can, right? And I think that this is like, so maybe I'll take two markets to give you an example, study and contrast here, right? So one is in-space data relay.

NASA does, of course, work in this market of relaying data between some space-based origin point for the traffic and some ground-based destination for the traffic, right? And so this is what the TDRS satellites do. They are satellites in the geostationary belt, like the ISS is one of their users, right? So space-based origin point, the ISS sends a signal with, you know, the astronauts, whatever messages, for example, bounces off the TDRS satellites back to wherever it needs to go on Earth to get the message from origin to destination.

That is also a market where the DoD has many interests, right? So the space development agency, the SDA's various satellite layers are also meant to provide some of this type of functionality. Now, they are optimizing for a different type of mission, and they have a different type of customer, but it's the same, I guess, type of service at some level, right? Like, is it Leo? Is it Geo? Put that to one side. It is relay of messages sent from a space-based endpoint to a ground-based endpoint.

That is very different from the commercial Leo destinations market. CLD is not really a defense pursuit. Space Force may or may not ultimately place Guardians in space. That is, I think, again, a separate question, but the Space Force is not, to my knowledge, no part of the military has in the past and is currently planning to, to my knowledge, fund a full station with a crew of sagely equipped people. I think it was like the 1960s, there was the manned orbiting laboratory, I think was going to host Air Force. That was like the, but they, it was canceled really before it got going and that was pretty

much, and I guess we had some military on space shuttle flights when that was the only launch vehicle for all national security stuff. Exactly. But not really in any of the way that you're talking about. Yeah. Exactly. And the space shuttle is really interesting, right?

Because it was a point of national policy that you're going to use the shuttle. I don't know that left to their own devices, the DoD customer would have settled on the space shuttle as their preferred mode of transport. Right, and they clearly didn't. I mean, when they had they basically created our modern, or at least a handful of our rocket companies that we have now, right, that's in the EELV program. I mean,

then this goes back to this idea though of how then, where do these programs come from if there's no market? I mean, this is the charge of NASA's to develop the commercial space industry. This is where I kind of go back to this idea of a faith-based, like commercial Leo destinations. I mean, I remember reading the Stipi reports from 2017 saying that this literally makes no financial sense. There's no market for this, yet we have a program now. I mean, you must have worked on things like that.

It's, and it's not necessarily wrong, I guess, is what I'm trying to say, but it's not what we tend to think of as a private market. It's almost the opposite. Are there historical analogs you can think about for this? Is like, where has government gone in and basically pulled a new market out of the ether and established it and said,

this is going to be because we want it so. basically pulled a new market out of the ether and established it and said, this is going to be because we want it so. That's not necessarily just national defense. Yeah. So I guess maybe putting things in context for listeners here. So the report that you're alluding to, the Stipi report, Bevilol, who created OTPs, was one of the authors on that report.

And this was a report that looked into the prospects for a privately sustained space station. And indeed, as you mentioned, found that the prospects were not that bright. Now, granted, perhaps this has changed since 2017, but that is at least where things were in 2017. And Stipe also did similar reports. So Tom Colvin, who was

also with me at OTPs, led a study on the drivers of demand for CIS lunar goods and services, and assessed whether there is indeed a profitable lunar market just around the corner. And again, the prospects were not as bright, I think, as many would hope. Again, the prospects were not as bright, I think, as many would hope. So can I think of historical analogies? Maybe. I mean, I can, I don't know, I think that this is kind of an academic stock and trade, right? Like before I went to NASA, I was an econ professor at Middlebury College. And you know, we can torture analogies to fit, you know, depending on how much work we're willing to do there. I think that NASA finds itself in a rather unique position for a federal agency for a couple reasons.

And to understand what's unique, let's think about what the market actually is. So cut the market into maybe three segments. One segment is the super off the shelf, very commercial, very cots, right? Stuff where maybe you've got a new thing, a new element of that, but you're not doing something fundamentallyots, right? Stuff where maybe you've got a new thing, a new element of that, but you're not doing something fundamentally new, right? So like when the space force needs uniforms, yes, they have a new pattern. Yes, their order size may be weird. However, making a uniform is not a new thing. Humanity has made uniforms before clothing exists, right? Like these are, these are not new things. The market can fix this and you just have to be willing to buy.

On the other side are things that are super advanced, like there is no market for this. There is no demand for this. If you want the thing, you are going to have to pay for it and you're going to have to pay for all of it because you are perhaps the only person who wants it. Right. So missions to the moons of Saturn to send autonomous rovers and sample the atmosphere, there is just no market for that. If NASA wants to send Dragonfly somewhere, NASA's got to build Dragonfly and NASA's got

to get Dragonfly from point A to point B. There is no one else stepping in to purchase that. So those are fairly standard, I'd say, categories. And DoD plays a lot in both of those. You have DOD building exquisite new systems to do all kinds of things and you have DOD buying cell phones in bulk. This middle section, I think, is sort of unique to NASA and that's what I call the cultivation phase of the market.

So it's kind of a gardening analogy. In that middle phase, you are not doing something that is totally technologically new. There are perhaps examples before. It's not totally new in terms of market either. There are other people who want to buy it too. They're just maybe not as willing to pay as you are. And it's also not developed enough that you can just go and buy it. so CLD I think is exactly in this fate with the ISS and all of the other stations that we've had and have right like we kind of know what a station is we know how a station works

that has been done before that is not new at the same time it is not like you can go out and find a person relatively quickly who has been to space and has been to a station and or who is planning to go in the next three years. It is still very much a new market. And so in this phase, you have to be very, I would say, flexible and mindful of what is happening and how to, in order to keep the market from collapsing, right? So if you want to have many people competing for something, for say station services, to provide test racks, then you need to think very carefully

about what are the conditions under which more than one entity can provide those test racks? What are the prices they can offer? Who is in the market to buy those things? Is what's being offered likely to attract that demand or not. Even if you want to see the market develop and get government out of the way very quickly, as the government actor who is buying most of the stuff and is going to send the signals

to the market participants as to what stuff they should be building, you've got to think very hard about markets here. And so I'd say that that middle layer is relatively unique. I think NASA is one of the few, if not the only, federal agencies that plays a very large role there with things that are totally new and that have no, you know, from a demand perspective. And I think that's just a challenging place for NASA to be. It's not an agency that has the same kind of deep pockets

as, for example, DoD. It is also not an agency that has the same kind of like clear economic function, for example, as DoE might, right? Like Department of Energy has loan programs. Department of Energy has all kinds of economic programs to build out various advanced technology, let's say products. NASA is a bit more limited in its flexibility there.

In your role then, you know, as a working economist at NASA is how would you try to guide some of these programs? Can we talk about like CLD? Like what were some of the ways that you tried to engage or some of the issues that came up to try to direct it to make it useful? I mean because you can't just sit there and say like, ah you know, numbers say this won't work, right? You have to do, how are you productive and how are you trying to steer or provide some helpful guidance to programs like that? Yeah, so I'm happy to talk about this. I'll maybe be a little bit vague here, just because I know that on the CLD side, the folks there

are very much, as far as I understand it, still in the thick of things and trying to make things work. We could talk about it in a broader sense, but you can kind of use general examples. It doesn't have to just be CLD. But where would this expertise, where would your expertise kind of come in, and what would you try to do in big terms for these things?

Yeah, so high level two types of things that economists do at NASA. One is outward facing functions, so like the economic impact report that I know you all have are very familiar with, right? Indeed, yes. The multipliers, inputs, outputs, how much economic impact, yes, that was a very, is a very valuable maybe past tense at this point. Yeah. So that that type of thing is is one of the places where economists are involved at NASA. And so Alex McDonald led sort of that function for most of my time there. And when I stepped into the acting role, I picked up some of those responsibilities. So that's one thing. But that's not what you're, I think, asking after here. The second thing is more internally focused on what the agency is doing and how to think

about markets where the agency wants to engage. That was where I spent most of my time working. And so as background, most of my academic research was about orbital debris. And so at OTPs, I did also have some orbital debris related work. OTPs, as many know, had been at the very leading edge of cost benefit analysis for space sustainability.

So when I got there, because that was where a lot of my research was and that was an active area of interest, I did that. But that was not, I would say, in general, necessarily a role for an economist. That was just a happy confluence of factors. What I did, I would say, more in the sort of economist role was market estimates. And so that was about estimating the sources of demand for various goods that the agency had an interest in, goods and services.

So CLD, for example, who is going to demand accommodations? How much money would they be willing to pay for accommodations? And how much revenue does that translate to for the station provider? And if we know how much revenue does that translate to for the station provider? And if we know how much revenue the station can earn from, let's say, five different lines of business, what does that tell us about how many stations might be sustainable at pick a time point, pick a set of conditions that you want to assume?

And so that was the type of thing that I did was a lot of just building up estimates, working with a team to build up the estimates to make sure that we had kicked the tires on all the sources of uncertainty, that, you know, any particular item of interest for decision makers in the agency was something that we could speak to and provide insight on. So that when those decision makers had to sit down and assess, okay, this plan that we want to do requires that there be at least this much revenue to, you know, prevent us from paying the full cost, we could provide some inputs as to how likely that was. You're kind of like a gut check, right? Like, yeah, does this does, is this a real thing?

Or what is this a real thing? Or what can we expect? Is this a real thing? Does this make sense? And what are the moving pieces that make this what it is and not something else that it is not? The second piece, though, was in designing or coming up with concepts or architectures that would be economically sustainable.

And so there were some programs where we did our market estimates. We assessed that the way that things are shaped right now may not make sense for the ambitions that the agency has. And so what do you do about that? Like you said, it's not enough to just be like, eh, it doesn't make sense. So we would go, my team and I would go a step further

and say, OK, so here is the shape of an architecture that would make economic sense. Here is where government needs to be involved in providing capital and here is where you let multiple providers compete. And here is what the budget implications of these are. And in general, we would always do these things in sort of a budget neutral sense. So whatever money has already been set out, let's work within that money to achieve the objective. Assume that there is nothing else. How can you work?

It strikes me that you don't have a lot of data to work with in something like this. And maybe that's also, I would say, if I could try to summon a critique of these types of surveys and estimates, well, it only takes one transformative technology, reusable rockets, Starship, let's say. I see this a lot.

Oh, or just one visionary will show that all these estimates were wrong, and actually it was possible the whole time. So why do we even waste our time thinking about this and that kind of framing of it? And that but I don't necessarily want to frame it that way obviously, but just this idea that Space as you kind of pointed out right is such an unusual domain both in terms of economics but and just physically right and the number of lessons or actual

Commercial actors in this it's all so small how do you get anything how do you even try to understand what's out there if the answer is basically some breakthrough technology will change everything how do you model something like that in economics so this is this is I think a very good question because that's it right that's that that's the hard challenge here is like how do you deal with this level of not just uncertainty, but like ambiguity, right? We don't even know what the possibilities are

to say how likely they are. So let me maybe put this into three buckets, right? So one is, as you mentioned, I'm a trained economist. And so I have a very opinionated view for how you structure the models, how you set up the calculation before you even do it, right, for these types of things. And so that was one piece of it was an understanding just even conceptually, what are the things

we're thinking about at a philosophical level? You know, my team, we were not the no people, we were the yes, if people. So even if we say it doesn't work now, that conclusion is something that we got to after figuring out what has to be true for it to work, and then assessing whether those conditions were currently true, and also how those conditions seem to be evolving. Do they seem to be evolving towards becoming true? Are they not? Are they kind of static? Are there other trends that are relevant here? And so at a philosophical level, right, like very opinionated framework for how to put things together, but also philosophically committed to getting to yes and understanding

very clearly what had to be true to make that yes, something that we could stand behind professionally. So that was the first piece. The second piece I would say is we, you know, you're right, that data is limited, but there's a lot more than people think there is. And so we had, you know, very, very good team. I would say, I would say that it was the best action oriented economics team that NASA has ever had. That is, that is something that someone else said to me.

It's very flattering, but we, you know, we had people who genuinely would collect a lot of data, who would bring that data together and help us make sure that we had everything that could reasonably be gone. I've mentioned here, I think my colleague, Tom, who incredible work in being very imaginative and thinking about how the technologies might fit together

and what is actually possible. The third piece though was we talked with industry constantly. We talked with other government agencies constantly. We were much less of a desk research shop than I had kind of expected when I was in academia and looking at what the work might be. Much more just out there talking to people, making sure that we understood details. So another person I'll mention, Adrian Manjuka on my team at OTPs, very deep knowledge of industry,

very, very seasoned in that world, really helped us get a lot of interviews and interactions with folks. Renata Kamal, another analyst on the team, also helped bring a lot of interviews and interactions with folks. Renata Kamal, another analyst on the team, also helped bring a lot of these insights together so that not only do we have the latest information from people who are actually in the arena trying to build these things and how they think about their markets and how they think about their businesses, not only do we have a lot of data that we've collected from open source sources and an ability to see what the technologies would need to be and how they can fit together.

We put that together with, like I said, a very opinionated framework for how do you get to profitability in this segment with whatever these technologies are. I feel fairly confident that even if we were wrong in some of our estimates, in like the point estimate, the number, the range, the magnitude that we got to was right. And the drivers that we identified as, you know, if, you know, if you need a breakthrough technology, to break through technology has to be able to do A, B, and C, but if it does D, then that's just not going to move the needle.

You may think it will, but here's why it won't, right? Like those sorts of yes, if statements were where I put a lot of stock, right? Like those were where we were super diligent. We'll be right back with the rest of our space policy edition of Planetary Radio after this short break. Greetings, Bill Nye here. The U.S. Congress approves NASA's annual budget and with your support,

we promote missions to space by keeping every member of Congress and their staff informed about the benefits of a robust space program. We want Congress to know that space exploration ensures our nation's goals in workforce technology, international relations, and space science. Unfortunately, important missions are being delayed, some indefinitely. That's where you come in. Join our mission as a space advocate by making a gift today. Right now, when you donate, your gift will be matched up to $75,000

thanks to a generous Planetary Society member. With your support, we can make sure every representative and Senator in D.C. understands why NASA is a critical part of U.S. national policy. With the challenges NASA is facing, we need to make this investment today. So make your gift at planetary.org slash take action. Thank you. So OTPs no longer exists. That was one of the, you were introduced as the former acting, which implies

that you were part of that. And that which was, I mean, it's nice to talk to you now, but obviously that's a feel bad for you and your team and everyone else who kind of has been suffering through these layoffs. What does it tell you then that this type of input is no longer deemed valuable? What does it tell you about the future

of the types of decisions that will be made at NASA? I don't know, I guess is maybe the short answer, right? I, and part of the reason I don't know is because we don't know whether this type of input will reemerge at NASA in a different form, or when it will reemerge. So taking a step back, Alex McDonald was the chief economist. He retired at the end of December last year. Then I stepped in as the acting. And my sort of understanding of that role had always been that

I'm here as an interim figure to ensure that the work continues and also that when the new administrator is in, there is someone who can articulate what this function is to support the administrator in making whatever decision they need to make about what the future looks like or that type of function. So that didn't happen, so it goes. My hope is that someone at the administrators in their suite or around in their orbit will share with them, you know, here are some of the inputs that we got from this function and the agency will at some point in the not too distant future, have that function once again,

because I think it is necessary, right? I think it's super important to have a figure near the administrator who can give them sound advice about economic matters and is not attached to any program, mission directorate, or any other sort of interest there, right? Whose sole interest is in ensuring that the administrator has the best possible advice on what the truth is and, you know, where things are or are not going. So that's very much my hope. But to your point, I do not know. Many of the things that have been floating around about what the future holds for NASA seem quite different from the agency as of even a month ago. And so I don't know.

Who knows? It just strikes me as a strange choice, given the seeming direction we'll be investing more in these types of private relationships or private development or commercial development. That's where I kind of brought up this idea. It's like a faith, it almost then becomes faith. And again, we don't know exactly

what the type of inputs will be. But I think your point though of this, the conflicts of interest that can kind of exist. And this is, you know, planetary society, we have opinions about what we would like, but we don't make any money, right? Getting permission to Europa, right? There's no financial interest.

We just get to see the pictures and learn the science and then come back. And, you know, so one of the things we try to do is just, you know, in our limited way, try to put out as much of our analysis and perspective, knowing that we have a perspective, but also knowing that we don't get anything from it. And you talk about data and lots of data.

And I've had this discussion at Jet Corps from payload space research I had on a few months ago. There is data out there, but it's really hard particularly for non-experts to see who's producing good data and who has a lot to gain by presenting a certain perspective, right? So this is where a lot of this economic discussion is really interesting to me

because we see this $3 trillion space economy projected by Merrill Lynch. Oh, and just so happens they have these financial packages. They're happy to sell you. So you're in on this game, right? But then it's just repeated, repeated, repeated, repeated that this will be, you know, that number sticks. And is there an issue, I guess, with the type of data that people are able to make this access? And I feel like that goes out so far, it loops back to the policymakers themselves,

to them say, well, why do we need a public space agency there's going to be a three trillion dollar space economy why do we why do we need to pay for it this will just happen on its own absolutely and i mean just uh expand on that a little bit i think that that exact dynamic you've described like i have seen it and i think it is it is incredibly harmful to the industry itself in a way that I worry not enough people appreciate. If you tell a government sponsor that there's no need for government spending, or if you tell them that there will be this huge commercial market that is going to be buying all of this stuff, right, like that'll be buying space station services, for example, it's going to be worth hundreds of billions, if not trillions of dollars. The thing that the procurement person or the contracting person or the person on the government side is going to hear is, oh, great.

So then I don't have to spend as much money on this. And the thing that is going to happen then is that those companies that were hoping to do that thing are going to see less in the way of government funding which is very nice it's non diluted so the government doesn't take an equity stake in your business which other investors love to see that because it means that their stake is not diluted it just has all of these these not so great knock-on effects that I really don't think it helps anyone in the industry to promote, let's say, overly optimistic, or for that matter, overly pessimistic views of what the future is likely to be.

And so I do think that that's a big problem for government decision-making. And I think that if the government, if governments broadly want to build real durable economies around space exploration, it is better to do that with a more accurate picture than a less accurate one. And so if, I don't know, I'll maybe make a brief plug here. So the chief econ team, we decided that we would keep doing this type of analysis and providing it to folks, now a broader set of folks, industry as well as government, as our own firm. And so rational futures, you can look us up online.

We are trying very hard to provide these types of realistic yes-if estimates to people in advanced technology sectors, not just space, who want to make better decisions. And so this includes governments, this includes private folks, broader set than what we were doing before. But I would really hope that within the government, they have this type of expertise in-house, because I think it would really help them, help all of us.

There is an issue I key on a lot, type of expertise in-house because I think it would really help them, help all of us. There's an issue I think that's, I key on a lot and I'm curious to hear your take on it. Particularly your undergraduate background, was it in science or physics or anything or was it all, did you start out in economics? Business and finance. Business and finance. So I'd be curious about how you've gone through this because you specialize, do I understand

correctly your PhD thesis was in orbital debris? Correct, the economics of it. The economics of it. And this is all tying back to this point, which is I think part of these, I'm not necessarily saying that some of these reports are intentionally misleading or anything. And I think there's a tendency,

particularly for people who don't have much grounding in what are orbital mechanics like, what are the, that space, you mentioned this earlier, you can torture analogies out to say what will happen in the space domain, but I think we have to be so careful with that because space is alien, right? It's completely different.

There's no air, you're moving it, you have to move it 17,000 know, there's no air, you're moving it, you have to move it 17,000 miles an hour just to stay in orbit. All of these kinds of consequences of the fundamental physical requirements to do something in space, that are so unusual that we don't engage in intuitively, that it's probably really easy for people to overlook them. And then to say, Oh, well, it's just like delivering commercial mail back in the 1920s or something investment.

Oh, or just like homesteading or whatever, right? And they take these analogies, plop them on without understanding that they just fundamentally cannot work in the same way because of these subtleties. Do you see that as a fundamental challenge? And how did you approach this as you entered this field? What did you find? Was there anything in particular surprising or something you really figured out you had to learn in order to model and understand the economics correctly about the physical realities of working in space?

That's another really good question because yeah, as you note, I do not have any kind of space science or technology background. Yeah, I was a business and finance undergraduate at UC Riverside and then worked in machine learning for a while and then went to graduate school. And so, closest I get, I guess, is math and statistics. So I think that there's maybe two aspects to what you just described, right? One is that indeed, space is quite different physically. And this does create, I think, very interesting and unique effects. So in my dissertation, I studied the economics of orbital debris and orbit use broadly.

That meant that I had to have at least a working understanding of orbital mechanics. Like how would you model an orbit? How would you calculate the expected number of collisions between objects in a volume? Right? And a lot of this stuff is like, okay, it's math. And so like you do an econ PhD, you do a lot of math. And so I can I can handle that right but intuitively you're right right like it took me many years I think to really internalize that changing inclination is very very hard and not something that most operations are going to be doing very often if at all and that just you know like in my head I guess for a long time I had this picture of like it's a speedboat it's in space

you know you just you speed up and then you slow down and then you turn around and you know you do all right So so that's not how it really works. That's I think important if you're trying to do like good work Because both at the detailed quantitative level It's super important and also at a high level like it stops you from saying silly things like oh, yes Why doesn't the CubeSat then just change the inclination and then, you know, have a very long life afterwards. Right. Why can't you just fly the space station to the moon or something instead? Exactly.

Exactly. Right. So I think that's super important for that. I think the other piece though that is really hard as well, but differently so, is in understanding the analogies and the kind of fundamental economic characteristics of space well enough to see where some things just don't work the way that you might expect them to work on earth, right? And so I think the railroad analogy is is one of these really useful ones. People talk about the railroads as

being like, you know, this huge economic driver, both in the US and in the UK. And, you know, we built these transportation systems can treat it as infrastructure, you know, this huge economic driver both in the US and in the UK and, you know, we built these transportation systems and treated them as infrastructure, you know, we would have a lot more economic activity in space. And, you know, the answer I think is a definite maybe, but at a sort of very fundamental level with a train to a different part of the UK, like you are going from where people are to another place where people are. And that's kind of important because not a lot of folks get on train rides to nowhere.

But people want to go places in general where there are other people. They would like there to be restaurants, they would like there to be amenities, they would like there to be family members, like an error is very important. There. There's errors I think very important I hear. But these are things that don't yet exist in space. And so when we talk about like, ah, well, we need to have a good transportation system and then we'll have people, you know, making trips to the moon more regularly, like, I don't know, maybe what are you gonna do on the moon? What's there that is attractive for a consumer on the moon? And, you know is attractive for a consumer on the moon?

And this is where I think it is not quite as technically challenging by far as orbital mechanics, but it is, I think, equally or more important as sort of very first principles level of understanding to making useful statements about markets for space things. I just want to dwell on that a little bit because I think this is so interesting and this idea, it's such a human, we just take what we know and we kind of graft it onto something else. And as you point out, on Earth that can work really well because so many of these fundamental assumptions, as you said, there are people where you're going to go, whether you knew it or not, there's probably going to be people around there. And that fundamentally changes the concept

of an economic incentive, because that's where trade comes from, and that's where economic growth can come from. But moon rocks don't trade back with you, right? They just go there. But it's also this, I think, and I've always thought about this when people talk about using the moon to create resources for,

you know, we'll get the water and we'll make rocket fuel. It's like, well, yeah, is that like just building a gas station in the middle of Alaska? And then you have to fly to it for 10 hours. You know, what's the use of having a gas station there if no one is driving by, right? People put gas stations where people are traveling.

And I mean, that's the inherent challenge of this. People want something to be true so bad. And we're pushing the limits, I mean, that's the inherent challenge of this. People want something to be true so bad. And we're pushing the limits, I think, of what we're able to do because by definition, we're going into an alien environment that we just, we don't know how things work there. And there isn't necessarily, and you can correct me on this, can we even expect with confidence that economics,

as we've understood them on earth, will work in space the same way? A big part of early physics in the 20th century was realizing that physics and chemistry and geology now that basically works the same out in the cosmos as it does here on earth, but we don't really know until we go and try it out, but those are all kind of natural forces.

But what about human created systems? Like, is there any expectation those should work where there are not humans and in completely different incentives and environments? Is this a domain error, I guess, to apply some of these principles to a place where we've never actually tested it So my answer is yes economics applies everywhere at least it applies everywhere

Do you think it's like a fundamental force of at least of humans and as the two humans and or three? What does it require three people to have an economy or something like that? Yes, but maybe not in the same way as physics, right? So like I would say that at its core think of economics in two layers, right? At the most basic layer is what is true about transactions and activity that can be done gainfully, right? So this is the layer where you can say something like,

listen, I don't care whether you are on Earth or Saturn or wherever else, if you have two entities where one and two activities and this is how much of each activity those two entities can do in unit time, then this is the maximum possible amount that they can produce individually and here is what they can produce if they are willing to trade, right? Like comparative advantage is not about humans. It's a more abstract statement. And so that gives it a bit more breadth. Like you can look at at fungal networks and roots and you can see exchange of nutrients and you can use market,

you know, the same mechanics of understanding trade and markets to understand nutrient exchange between those entities. Nothing human there. It's just this is what is possible and subject to evolutionary and adaptive forces. This is just where you will go if you want to maximize exchange. So that's kind of one layer that that's going to apply everywhere. The second layer is just that like people trade, people do that. And so if you want to have a lot of people in space, you have to think about how they're going to trade. What are they going to trade? And that's just kind of, I don't know, maybe not a domain error to apply economics in that sense, but it tells you something about what you want the domain to be. Right? Like if I really want to have

a lot of people, hundreds of thousands, billions even of people living in space, then I should probably think about how those many, many people are going to interact with each other, exchange goods and services with each other. And yeah, economics helps you think about that. I guess that as long as someone covets something that someone else has, some arbitrage, right? That's the essence, then it develops. So it requires humans to be, I mean, that's the thing, I guess it requires someone has to be there or have access to it or something. Or be exchanging goods and services on earth, right? Or it like dragonfly. We can talk about the economics of dragonfly, even if there are no people on Saturn, right? It does feel like when people talk,

it or even though some of the feedback that we see online to some of our posts or some of the questions that we try to answer, you know, talking about markets and they can just do it for us, we don't need to do it ourselves. I tend to respond by saying, you know, the only market in space is when you put something up that turns back and points back down. To me, that's like, that's where the market, because that's where the people are. You're just bouncing, you know, as you're bouncing other people's ideas down to other people, or you're looking at other people, or you're looking at your own weather, you know, a lot of this at other people, or you're looking at your own weather. A lot of this is beyond that.

There's no really independent market. Everything is trying to be created. And I think, though, that there's this idea that has taken hold as almost like this dream. Because then it kind of frees you. The taxpayer is then the procurement officer. That it frees us from having to do something else. But where

I'm going with this is that I was thinking, when I was reading one of your papers in preparation for this interview, you mentioned your old boss's Alex McDonald's book, The Long Space Age, which I just loved. I think it's one of the most thoughtful and interesting books that I've read about this stuff. And this idea that there was kind of some space exploration was something different, but there were private efforts to do in the United States before this huge government investment that happened in the mid-20th century. But also that there's this idea, there's

a value that is maybe not what we classically think of as economic. And this is what I'm curious to hear about how you incorporate this into understanding the economic incentives and intentions and desires that people have. Because maybe another way to put it, so I don't know if you've ever seen someone rolling coal,

right? Or just driving like a big ugly truck, and they just burn a bunch of gas. And they're like, ha ha. And it's like, you're the sucker. I mean, how much are you spending on gas right now? What's your gas mileage? Like, five miles to the gallon? Like it's like, you're the sucker. I mean, how much are you spending on gas right now? What's your gas mileage? Like five miles to the gallon?

Like, all right, you got me. And then like how much you, I told that to an economist friend once, and he was like, well, maybe it's worth it. Maybe they get enough value sticking it to you. So like, it's like, oh, value comes in a lot of ways, basically. And so, you know, I'm going to this idea in Alex's book,

he talks about this sign signaling as one of the benefits in a sense of investment. There's also, you could argue, a variety of other second order or kind of, we've talked a lot about these days at the Planetary Society, values and curiosity, inspiration, all these kind of field, the big picture aspirational Carl Sagan eschews.

And let's have value too, but we're just not, it's hard to quantify. And so how do you or economists in general, or in this particular sphere, how do you try to capture or do you try to capture these types of clear benefits that are hard to quantify in a science that is essentially, you know, you're doing math. How do you capture, you know, what's, you know, the psi value of, you know, signaling factor to your geopolitical rivals? Yeah, so that's, that's a really tough one. Let me, let me split that out. Specifically, the geopolitical signaling aspect that you mentioned is, I think, one

of the least well understood areas of economic theory, right? So just at a theoretical level, like you can use game theory and many of the tools that we have in economics to study all kinds of objectives. Right. And a thing that many economists will say that I have said as well in the past is like, I'm not here to tell you what you should or should not value. Tell me what you value. Tell me what you want.

I will help you achieve that with you know, with, with minimal cost, with maximal, you know, whatever the case is, like, I'm here to help you achieve what you value. I'm not here to tell you what you should or should not value. And so many, many economists make that distinction. And so in that world, you know, if you tell me that you want to do this mission, like the following three missions and that one of them is really about geopolitical signaling and the other two are about making sure that you achieve, you know, some end state, then great, I will take the resources that you tell me you have and I will tell you how to do all three of those

as best as possible. But if you ask me a more fundamental question, right, of like, where will geopolitical signaling evolve going forward? Or like, how important will this particular notion of signaling remain compared to these other three notions of signaling? Like, give me a clear quantitative roadmap of how that looks. That is very hard. And that is, I think, not really well done. And if there are economists who are looking for space-related topics to study that are also kind of a fundamental economic theoretical interest, I would say this is one of them.

But coming maybe one step back to your point of, like, how do you provide useful advice and useful insight? Like, again, I think this is a thing that our team at NASA did very well. And that, you know, now we continue to do just outside NASA, right, which is, this is why you talk to lots of people, and you understand what they're about. And you look at the documents and you look at the, the priorities that have been stated explicitly and revealed through choices, so that you understand how important those are.

And then you think about budgets and whether it actually happens. Well, that's always kind of, I mean, that always seems to be the rub. I guess, I mean, just to go a little deeper into the question for me is, is there a theoretical structure that economists have to try to quantify hard to quantify things in that sense. Is there a strategy? Again, it doesn't have to be necessarily geopolitical signaling, which I can see variable based

on, yeah, very hard to predict what the overall geopolitical situation in the future of the world will be. But even then something like, does it make you feel proud? Or is it a nice scientific curiosity? Yeah, sure, that's great. Or fundamental scientific research. How do you try to capture something like that that you can't, there's no like quanta of curiosity value

that is exchanged on some market that you can have an efficient market hypothesis for? Are there ways to try to capture that? Or is it so fundamentally insignificant to reveal desires that it tends to just wash out in the data? So what you're asking after, how do you quantify hard to quantify things? Absolutely economists, we do this quite a bit.

So my field in economics is not actually space economics. That is not a field of economics that is recognized by the professional associations. I'm considered an environmental economist by many economists. And this is a field in which we are constantly trying to quantify things that have no markets. So when you think about people's willingness to pay for environmental amenities, right? So yes, clean air, clean water, but more than that, like access to a particular fishing site for recreational purposes. There are no markets for this, right? Like some fishing sites, yes, you know what people are willing to pay to go there because there's tickets and so forth. But many, many are not like that.

And so if you are thinking about how to site a plant that is likely to pollute some fishing, some water bodies, some fishing sites, and you've got a choice of three different locations, each with a different number of sites, a thing that environmental economists would help you with there is an understanding the damages that people are going to experience because they like going to these different sites, but they

can substitute between the sites so that you understand sort of what are you potentially on the hook for? What are you doing and how do you minimize the damages that are experienced? And so this type of thing, this type of valuation, I would say it's standard enough that you are taught it in graduate school in economics for like how to conduct that type of exercise or how to think about that type of exercise, whether or not you actually do it right. And to your point, indeed, while there is no market there, you can ask people, you know, very carefully constructed hypotheticals to get at the money

that they would be willing to pay or willing to accept, whichever it is that you're after, to either receive that non-market good or service or to lose that non-market good or service. Receive for willingness to pay, lose for willingness to accept. So you can quantify these things and you know, it's not perfect, but all the evidence that we have you know this is a many decades old approach all the evidence we have suggests that it works reasonably well if you you know do it well if you do a good job of it that's a different type of quantification of things that are difficult to quantify though than we often did for space things right and so my my then colleague now business partner Tom Tom Colvin, has been kind of a real mentor here for me and for others on how do you quantify things that

people say cannot be quantified. Right. And this can be things like, for example, the damages in dollar units from a particular piece of debris persisting in orbit for many more years. That's a difficult thing to quantify. There's many moving pieces to that. But Tom did a great job of it in the cause-benefit analysis work that he did for OTPs. So that I would say is more bespoke and that is much more technology specific, that type of exercise, but it is something that we did much more of at NASA. So NASA as a government agency is constrained in what materials it can send out to the public, something called the Paperwork Reduction Act. And so we never did a contingent valuation study

of how much do people actually value the night sky, for example, or debris removal. Although OTP has did fund some researchers who did a study like that. I believe Patrice Cole was the PI on that research and I hope that they have been able to publish it well. Anyway, all this just to say, maybe to wrap this up, that if you're thinking about what people are willing to pay, yes, there is a standard methodology in economics, contingent valuation, there's journals about it, you know, conferences about it. It's a whole thing. If you're thinking about something much more bespoke, and you know, what is the risk?

What is the expected risk of this outcome? Again, there are many different ways to do this actuarial approach since fourth. But, you know, really there you want to think very hard about what is the problem you're actually trying to solve and what do you actually need to quantify to solve the problem. Yeah I mean I even the definition of my question was like uh how do you measure things that are hard to measure is that tough one to answer. Before we wrap up do you think we need more people kind of it sounds like me I'd say yes but do you think we need more people doing rigorous economics studies in space

and what would you say to people considering this as a career, what you need to do and how to get into this career? I would say, I mean, yes, I think we do. I think that that is super useful, super important. I think we need those types of folks in the private sector. We need them in government. Yes. So that is my first answer to that. But to the second piece of how you get there, I mean, my path was super, I guess, idiosyncratic. I don't know that that's the path that other people should take, but you probably could do much worse than training in economics and then learning a lot about the space world

and trying to contribute there. I'd say the short answer is I don't really know, but I think that what we probably do need more of is really, really good applied economic theory. Much of the economics profession, I think right now is really focused on what we call causal inference and statistical analysis. And I think that that's useful, but as you note, there's not a lot of data compared to, say, I don't know, mortgages. There's not a lot of data on space-related markets. And so if your toolkit is one in which you are waiting for a large amount of data that you can then statistically analyze, I think in the space sector, you're going to find

yourself waiting in general quite a while. So I think it would be quite useful for folks who are interested in this type of thing to get reasonably tooled up with how to build your own theoretical models and how to integrate various kinds of engineering and scientific objectives and constraints into such efforts. Okay. You all heard it. Take your charge for your future economics PhDs. Dr. Akhil Rao, thank you so much for joining us.

Really enjoyed talking with you this month. Thank you very much for having me. We've reached the end of this month's episode of the Space Policy Edition of Planetary Radio, but we will be back next month with more discussions on the politics and philosophies and ideas that power space science and exploration. Help others in the meantime learn more about space policy and the planetary society by leaving a review and rating this show on platforms like Apple Podcasts or Spotify or wherever you listen to this show. Your input and interactions really help us be discovered by other curious

minds and that will help them find their place in space through Planetary Radio. You can also send us, including me, your thoughts and questions at planetaryradio at planetary.org. Or if you're a Planetary Society member, and I hope you are, leave me a comment in the Planetary Radio space in our online member community. Mark Hilberta and Ray Paoletta are our associate producers of the show. Andrew Lucas is our audio editor. Me, Casey Dreyer, and Merck Boyan, my colleague, composed and performed our Space Policy Edition theme. The Space Policy Edition is a production

of the Planetary Society, an independent nonprofit space outreach organization based in Pasadena, California. We are membership based and anybody, even you can become a member. They start at just $4 a month. That's nothing these days. Find out more at planetary.org slash join.

Until next month, add Astra. you