What Brad DeLong thinks about space
Economics professor at the University of California, Berkeley and a former Deputy Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury. Author of Slouching Towards Utopia and writer of the Grasping Reality newsletter.
Everything they publish, on ppll ↗
Brad DeLong did not write this page.
We collected these quotes from things they published elsewhere, and every quote links to where it was said. They have no account here and have not endorsed this site. Quotes are word for word; the short line under each one is our own restatement, not their wording. Their own site. Is this you? Claim it or ask us to remove it. Or tell us what is wrong here.
3 dated positions, 2026, in their own words. Our reading of what Brad DeLong has said — not written or endorsed by them.
The line under a date shows how recently it was said: empty within a month, full after three years.
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Their wordsIn the second quarter of this year, space contributed just 12 per cent of SpaceX’s $7.8bn in revenue. Starlink brought in 55 per cent; the AI business, which only arrived in February, already accounted for 33 per cent.
↗CROSSPOST: SINEAD O’SULLIVAN: SpaceX Pivots Away from Spacebraddelong.substack.com
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Their wordsBut when SpaceX removed the price constraint, the expected flood of customers never came. It turns out the old-guard space executives who decided not to spend billions on reusable R&D weren’t all dinosaurs. Some of them may simply have understood the demand curve correctly.
↗CROSSPOST: SINEAD O’SULLIVAN: SpaceX Pivots Away from Spacebraddelong.substack.com
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Their wordsWhich suggests that the real genius of SpaceX had nothing to do with aerodynamics or rocket telemetry but narrative rotation, as each new iteration of the company’s goals was financed by believers in the last.
↗CROSSPOST: SINEAD O’SULLIVAN: SpaceX Pivots Away from Spacebraddelong.substack.com
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