Steve Levitt

speaker

962 appearances 8 recordings 1 series first heard Dec 2024 last heard 31 Jul

Steve Levitt’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 5 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 2.

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Freakonomics Radio · 683. In the New Space Race, Who Makes the Rules? · 31 Jul 2026 podcast

Last episode, I spoke with people working on Project Suncatcher, Google's attempt to build AI data centers in space.

That team is thinking about the future, how much processing power we'll need, and how cheaply we'll be able to launch satellites.

So this week, I wanted to ground the conversation in the present and the past.

So I started by reaching out to an economist.

So you were the first chief economist at NASA, and it wasn't like you just stumbled into that job.

You were not a typical economist.

You're a PhD economist, and your research had been focused very squarely on space exploration.

Now, I've never met another economist who thought about space before.

Was space travel something that has been captivating you since you were a kid, or just something that caught your attention as promising research area when you were in grad school?

So in your analysis, Alex, of the economics of space, you don't just focus on the last 60 or 70 years studying with Sputnik or the Apollo missions.

You take a long view.

So in particular, you've looked at the construction of astronomical observatories over the history of the U.S.

and

You've come to what I would say are really interesting conclusions.

One thing that I found very surprising is how expensive some of these observatories were.

They were massive investments.

And when you say they cost a billion dollars in modern terms, that's not too different than the cost of the kinds of things that NASA does.

Now, not necessarily going to the moon, but other projects they do aren't really categorically more expensive than these observatories were.

Now, you were appointed as the first chief economist at NASA in 2019, and you served in that role for five years.

It says a lot about how unimportant economists are to the world that NASA didn't think they needed a chief economist until 2019, don't you think?

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