Jonathan McDowell is a go-to expert for all things spaceflight. Thousands of subscribers read his monthly Space Report. But that has always been his side gig. For 37 years, McDowell has been a specialist in X-ray astronomy at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in the US. Earlier this year, he announced he was retiring from the role, and also leaving the US for Britain. The decision was prompted in part, he said, by the ongoing pressures on the federal science budget.
Born with dual citizenship of the US and Britain, McDowell joined the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in 1988 and leads the science data systems group there for Nasa’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, a space telescope in its 26th year.
In the next phase of his career, McDowell said, he wants to devote more time to documenting what’s happening in space. McDowell spoke about what drives his passion for space. This conversation has been edited for brevity and clarity.
QWhat sparked your interest in space?
There were really two routes. The satellites and space side really came about from the Apollo programme. I remember walking home from school in northern England. I saw the moon in the sky and thought: “Next week, for the first time, human beings are going to be up there. They’re going to be on another world.” That blew my mind as a nine-year-old.
The astronomy side came from wondering where we came from, what the real story was about how the universe came to be. That pushed me towards an interest in cosmology at a pretty early age. My father was a physicist, and all of my babysitters were, too. I kind of didn’t realise there was any other option.
Another big influence was Doctor Who, which I started watching at age three. That imbued me with a sense of wonder about the universe and the idea that one crazy person can help how humanity interacts with it. All of those things came together to make me just fascinated by what’s out there.
In the British school system, we specialise early. I was doing orbital calculations from age 14, and I learned Russian so I could read what the Soyuz astronauts were doing. I went on to do a PhD at Cambridge University, UK, so I got to hang out with people like Stephen Hawking and Martin Rees, the current Astronomer Royal. It couldn’t have been a better training.
On the side, I was leveraging my technical skills to go deeper into spaceflight. At the time, the media was not really covering space, so that forced me to do my own research.
QIs that what led to the creation of Jonathan’s Space Report in 1989?
I had just moved to the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, which was once a centre for space information for the public in the 1950s. Public affairs started bombarding me with questions they were still getting from the public so, in self-defence, I started preparing a briefing for them on what was happening in space each week. Someone recommended that I should put the briefing on Usenet, a sort of precursor to the Internet, which didn’t exist yet. To my surprise, it was popular. And I never looked back.
QWhy have you kept the Space Report free?
Honestly, most of the work on it I’m doing for myself anyway. I am the No. 1 reader. But I also have this role now of being someone people trust to say what’s really going on. I can only keep that reputation for independence and objectivity if I don’t take direct money for it.
QHow has spaceflight and space exploration changed over your lifetime?
I grew up in the 1960s during the superpower era. It was the US, the Soviet Union and the Cold War. In the 1970s, space became more international. China, Japan, France and others started launching their own rockets and satellites. Then in the 1990s, we saw a turn to commercialisation, in both communications and imaging. And then in the 2000s and 2010s, there was another
shift that I call democratisation, where cheap satellites made space within the budget of a university department, a developing country or a startup.
The most important thing about space in 2025 is not that there are many more satellites, but that there are many more players. This
has implications for governance and regulation.
Another way of thinking about how things have changed is where the frontier is. When I was a kid, it was low-Earth orbit. Now, the frontier is out near the asteroid belt, and the moon and Mars are becoming part of where humanity just hangs out, maybe not yet as people, but with robots. Meanwhile, low-Earth orbit is so normalised that it doesn’t take a space agency to deal with it. You just call SpaceX.
Jonathan McDowell
QHow are you planning to spend retirement?
The UK has been active recently in pushing for what we call space sustainability. They’re committed to using space, but responsibly. I’m hoping I can get involved in those efforts.
QWhat motivates you to record human activity in space so meticulously?
As an astronomer, I think in long time scales. I imagine people a thousand years from now, perhaps at a time when more people live off Earth than on it, who want to know about this critical moment in history when, for the first time, we were stepping into space. I want to preserve this information so they can reconstruct what we did. That’s who I’m writing for.
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