🚀 A Quick Q&A with economist Matt Weinzierl on the growing business of space

A fascinating Wayback Wednesday interview

My fellow pro-growth/progress/abundance Up Wingers,

The space business landscape is changing. Companies like SpaceX and Blue Origin are moving at breakneck speed toward goals Americans have dreamed of since the 1960s. At the same time, a whole host of smaller startups are arriving on the scene, ready to tackle everything from asteroid mining to next-gen satellites to improved lunar missions.

For an explanatory exploration of what research developments and market breakthroughs are allowing these companies to thrive, I asked a few questions of Matt Weinzierl, the senior associate dean and chair of the MBA program at Harvard Business School. He is also a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. Weinzierl is the co-author of a new book with Brendan Rosseau, Space to Grow: Unlocking the Final Economic Frontier.

(This interview is adapated from a March 6, 2025, Faster, Please! podcast episode.)

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1/ You’re not telling a story about privatization of space but a story about decentralization, correct?

It really is, I think the most important thing for listeners to grab onto. . . We had this amazing success in the ’60s with the Apollo mission and going to the moon and it truly was an amazing achievement, but it was obviously a very government-led, centralized program and that got us in the mode of thinking that's how you did space. And so for the next 50 years, basically we did space in that way run from the center, not really using market forces.

What changed in various ways was that in the early 2000s we decided that model had kind of run its course and the weaknesses were too big and so it was time to bring market forces in. And that doesn't mean that we were getting rid of the government role in space. Just like you said, the government will always play a vital role in space for various reasons, national security among them, but it is decentralizing it in a way to bring the power of the market to bear.