Jonathan McDowell has been a load-bearing part of the world’s spaceflight knowledge for more than four decades. His monthly newsletter on the industry – – details all upcoming launches and has become an essential resource for everyone from keen amateurs to space professionals, while his library of space industry information and ephemera, which occupies around 90 square metres, is one of the most extensive private collections on the subject in the world.
But now, McDowell is retiring and searching for a new home for this trove. He spoke to ¿ìè¶ÌÊÓƵ about space, work and his plans for the future.
Alex Wilkins: What role do you play in the space industry?
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Jonathan McDowell: I have two careers. For my day job, I’m an astrophysicist [at the Harvard–Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics]. Then on the side, since I was a teenager, I’ve been trying to be the journal of record for the space industry.
I was frustrated by the lack of detailed open information on how our exploration of space had proceeded. There was information that was being lost, and so I’ve made it my mission, so that people in the future, when they look back hundreds of years from now on this pioneering era of space exploration, and they ask, ‘Well, what did this mission actually do?’ I want that [information] to be recorded.
What information do you keep and what is in your collection?
There’s a whole bunch of different things. I have a lot of rare books, including rare Russian books on their space programme. Books in many languages from all over the world. The core of the collection are documents, either originals or Xeroxes, organised by launch. All the tens of thousands of rocket launches, both orbital and suborbital. I have a little binder section for each one, collating all the information from all the different sources for that launch. That’s a resource that no one else has. I’ve dumpster dived [NASA] and industry discard-piles around the world and Xeroxed in archives. It’s a pretty extensive collection.
That lets me answer questions like, what are the Starlink satellites actually doing versus what does SpaceX say they’re doing? How many seem to be still working? Is there evidence that some are not working so well? What’s the fastest space probe that there’s ever been? You never know when someone’s going to contact me and go, I’m looking into what happened to Skynet-1A [one of the UK’s oldest satellites] in the 1970s. They know that I’m the person to come to. For the scope of the collection that I have, it’s probably the most extensive surviving in the world, and certainly the most extensive in private hands.
How did you originally become interested in space?
My dad was a physicist. My babysitters were physicists. My first recollection of being interested in space goes back to when I was 3, and there was a new show on the BBC called Doctor Who. When I was 7, my dad worked at NASA for a year, and so I got to be around NASA the year before the moon landing. It was all downhill from there. I had the space bug. My nickname in the playground at age 8 was Satellite. So this is not a new thing for me.
When I was probably 12 or 13, I remember very distinctly that we were at a very boring party at one of my dad’s colleagues and I got dragged along. As usual, I went to browse this person’s bookshelves, and I found Jane’s All the World’s Aircraft, and they had a list in the back of that year’s satellite launches, which I copied down in my little notebook. I quickly realised that there were gaps in this list, and information that wasn’t fully there. So I set out to try and make a bigger list. And I taught myself to do the research. By the time I was in college, I had a pretty good satellite catalogue list, written out longhand at the time, for 10,000 objects.
You’ve been watching the space industry for four decades, during which there has been enormous change. What has that looked like to you?
The 1960s was the era of the superpowers in space. The 1970s was internationalisation — India launched its own satellites, Indonesia bought satellites for its own domestic communication — so you’ve got not just the superpowers, but the regular nation states. The 1980s saw commercialisation start to really kick in, particularly communication satellites. The next big sea change was in the early 2000s, the development of the cubesat, which led to the democratisation of space, where individual university departments can develop their own satellites, small startups can do their satellite. You have many, many more players. That is the most surprising thing that I wasn’t quite prepared for — not just the increase in the amount of activity in space, but the increase in the number of separate players, which makes it much harder to categorise and coordinate. A lot of the regulatory and legal infrastructure hasn’t really caught up to that reality.
What I also wasn’t expecting was that the commercial space companies are more secretive than the spy satellite agencies. They really don’t like giving out information. In the 70s, when a commercial company launched a communication satellite, you got really detailed press kits with everything. No one was worried then about, if I tell you the mass of this, it’ll be somehow detrimental to my stock price. Now, they’re so loath to reveal anything about what they’re doing. But the skills I developed trying to figure out what the NRO [US and the CIA and so on were up to have come in very useful figuring out what the commercial companies are doing.
You recently announced your retirement from your day job. What are your future plans?
After 35 years in the United States, I’ve decided it’s time for me to come back to England. Toward the end of this year, I’ll be retiring from my job in the US and schlepping all my stuff over to somewhere in the UK. I have this 1000-square-foot library, and finding space for that, in addition to space for me to live, is very challenging. But the idea is that I get set up, hopefully near London, and then once I’m settled, go back to doing the Space Report on the website pretty much full time. Within a year or two, I hope to be able to go into much more detail on every mission, assuming I live long enough to actually get it out there.
At that point, my plan would be to start to transition the stuff that I do to an open-source consortium of people who are almost as insane as I am. There are people out there who contribute in various ways. I’d like to formalise that, in the same way that Linus Torvalds handed off Linux [the open-source operating system] to the community.
How would you like to see the space industry change in future?
We desperately need an international sort of air traffic control system for space, some international umbrella that manages the Earth orbit environment. I want to see the commercial space industry succeed, but not at the cost of the environment and not at the cost of secrecy.
I have every hope that there will be more applications of space that are useful to people here on Earth, just as GPS now is. Like, how did we ever live without GPS?
Are there any particular launches or events you’re looking forward to?
I’m very much looking forward to the forthcoming astronomy satellites like the [Nancy Grace] Roman Space Telescope, helping to unveil the early universe and the history of the universe, that’s personally exciting for me, but I also definitely want to see a move towards being a multi-planetary species. I really want to see, not just send people to Mars, but let’s work on packaging our civilisation to be more portable, so that you can be self-sustaining. I don’t just want to grow potatoes on Mars, I want to build a semiconductor factory on Mars. How do you do that in a way that’s practical and sustainable? I don’t care about getting to Mars in 10 years or 20 years. I care about having self-sustaining settlements in the solar system 100, 200, 300 years from now.
