THE REMOTE SPACE AGE: THE ECONOMICS OF 19TH CENTURY SPACE EXPLORATION
- Paper number
IAC-09.E4.1.7
- Author
Mr. Alexander MacDonald, NASA - Ames Research Center, United States
- Year
2009
- Abstract
If economics is the study of the allocation of scarce resources then the first line of inquiry into the economics of space exploration is to ask how long, and to what extent, have we been expending significant resources on space exploration. This paper examines the expenditures on astronomical observatories and expeditions in the 19th and early 20th century and shows that human societies have been spending significant resources on space exploration with expenditure in the time period studied being comparable, after adjustment to current values, to large contemporary space exploration projects. The paper also examine the motivations behind the funding of a select number of these large scale projects by studying the public announcements and private writings of the funders. What emerges is that these resource intensive projects were driven by many of the same political and personal motivations that drive space exploration today. Given these results, I argue that we should think of the 19th century as comprising a “Remote Space Age” when humanity began to use the telescope to devote significant resources to the remote exploration of the cosmos to compete for prestige on an individual and, increasingly, national level in a number of precursor ’space races.’
- Abstract document
- Manuscript document
(absent)