Why NASA Hired a Chief Economist

Odd Lots

Bloomberg

Business News, News, Investing, News Commentary, Business

4.5 • 2K Ratings

🗓️ 31 March 2026

⏱️ 54 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

This week, NASA is scheduled to launch Artemis II, a mission that will send astronauts around the moon for the first time in more than 50 years. But this comes at a time when the space agency is facing some pretty big funding challenges, as well as growing competition with private players like SpaceX. In this episode, we speak with Alexander MacDonald, who served as NASA's first chief economist and is now a senior associate at the Aerospace Security Project at CSIS. We talk about why the space agency had economists, how space exploration is funded, and how NASA measures its own economic impact. Please note, this episode was recorded March 10.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Running a business means dealing with a lot of overly complicated software, and most CRMs tend to follow the same pattern.
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1:01.2	Odd Lots. Follow the show on Amazon Music for more future episodes or just ask. Alexa, play the Odd Lots podcast on Amazon Music.
1:14.3	Bloomberg Audio Studios.
1:17.2	Podcasts Radio News.
1:31.2	Hello and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots podcast.
1:32.1	I'm Tracy Allaway.
1:33.5	And I'm Joe Wisenthal.
1:38.7	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?
1:41.6	Yeah.
1:41.9	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? I've heard that they're like, I know. Some people look down on it, but I find it fascinating. Oh, 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.
2:15.6	No, I do. Like, oh, where do you live? Whatever. 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. Absolutely.
2:19.5	And as podcast hosts, we're always looking for interesting people.
2:19.5	That's right. And sometimes podcast hosts, we're always looking for interesting people.
	...

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