We tend to think of private space exploration as a recent phenomenon. But as Alex MacDonald, former Chief Economist at NASA, argues in his book "The Long Space Age," privately funded space exploration has deep roots in American history, stretching back more than two centuries.

In this 2017 conversation with The Planetary Society's Chief of Space Policy Casey Dreier, originally aired on the Space Policy Edition of Planetary Radio, MacDonald traces the economic history of American space exploration from the 1769 transit of Venus all the way to the present day, and makes the case that the government-dominated model we grew up with may actually be the historical anomaly.

Discover more at: https://www.planetary.org/planetary-radio/long-space-age