Alexander MacDonald served as NASA’s first Chief Economist. In this role, he helped to establish NASA’s Moon to Mars strategy and Artemis, and served as the Program Executive for the International Space Station National Laboratory. He is recognized as an expert on U.S. space policy and private-sector space activities.
He was formerly the Senior Economic Advisor in the Office of the Administration, and the founding program executive of NASA’s Emerging Space Office. He is a former staff member at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), former research faculty member at Carnegie Mellon University, and has worked for the Universities Space Research Association while at NASA’s Ames Research Center.
He received his undergraduate degree in economics from Queen’s University in Canada, his master’s degree in economics from the University of British Columbia, and was a Clarendon Scholar at the University of Oxford where he obtained his doctorate on the long-run economic history of American space exploration. He was also an inaugural TED Senior Fellow and received the AIAA History Manuscript of the Year Award in 2016 for his book The Long Space Age: The Economic Origins of Space Exploration from Colonial America to the Cold War published by Yale University Press. He was awarded the NASA Exceptional Service Medal in 2024.