A Self-Made Space Historian Is Stepping Into the Role Full Time

New York Times

12-04-2025

Jonathan McDowell is a go-to expert for all things spaceflight. Thousands of subscribers read his monthly Space Report, and far more people have seen him on cable news and other media platforms explaining unexpected events in orbit.
But that has always been his side gig: For 37 years, Dr. McDowell has been a specialist in X-ray astronomy at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. Earlier this year he announced he was retiring from the role, and also leaving the United States for Britain.
The decision was prompted in part, he said, by ongoing pressures on the federal science budget, made more complicated by policy changes since President Trump's inauguration.
'It just doesn't seem like the opportunities are going to be there to be an effective scientist, and an effective person building the science community, in the U.S. anymore,' Dr. McDowell said. 'I just don't feel as proud to be an American as I used to be.'
Born with dual citizenship in the United States and Britain, Dr. 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, Dr. McDowell said, he wants to devote more time to documenting what's happening in space.
With an accent that he joked is becoming decidedly more British as he prepares to move abroad, Dr. McDowell spoke with The New York Times about what drives his passion for space. This conversation has been edited for brevity and clarity.
What sparked your interest in space?
There were really two routes. The satellites and space side really came about from the Apollo program. 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 9-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 toward 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 realize there was any other option.
Another big influence was 'Doctor Who,' which I started watching at age 3. 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 specialize 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 Ph.D. at Cambridge University, 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.
Is 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 center 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-defense, 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 Web, which didn't exist yet. To my surprise, it was popular. And I never looked back.
I took a more international view than most news sources, particularly in the United States. I gave equal weight to what the Russians, the Chinese and the Europeans were doing. That helped me gain a reputation, and people in the space industry started sending me tidbits of information.
Why have you kept the space report free?
Honestly, most of the work 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.
How has spaceflight and space exploration changed over your life?
I grew up in the 1960s during the superpower era. It was the U.S., 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 commercialization, in both communications and imaging. And then in the 2000s and 2010s, there was another shift that I call democratization, where cheap satellites made space within the budget of a university department, a developing country or a start-up.
The most important thing about space in 2025 is not that there are 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 normalized that it doesn't take a space agency to deal with it. You just call SpaceX.
How are you planning to spend retirement?
The United Kingdom 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.
I compile a big catalog of space junk around the sun that the U.S. Space Force doesn't keep track of. It's no one's job right now to keep track of that. We really need to get our act together for the more distant stuff, what we're sending out in between the planets, because it comes back years later. We think it's an asteroid that's going to hit Earth, when it's really just a rocket stage.
Most space historians focus on the people, not the hardware, so another aspect of my whole shtick is documenting what space projects actually did. I've been dumpster diving in space agency libraries for 50 years. I have about 200 bookcases' worth of a library that is currently in 1,142 boxes. Half of the stuff is probably scattered on the internet. But a significant subset of it is fairly rare.
Obviously it all needs to be scanned, and it's going to take me years. I need to find a new home for the library, somewhere that is a reasonable commute from London. My plan is that when it's unpacked, I'll make it available by appointment to anyone who wants to come do research in it.
What 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. Not today's audience, but the audience a thousand years from now.