Industry Minister Mélanie Joly announced Wednesday that Alex MacDonald will be the next president of the Canadian Space Agency (CSA). MacDonald was NASA’s first chief economist and has spent the past year analyzing Canada’s space sector, saying it must move faster.
MacDonald succeeds Lisa Campbell, who led the agency from September 2020 until July, when senior vice-president Jean-Claude Piedboeuf took over as acting president. The Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada (ISED) release says the appointment followed an open, competency-based process opened in April with a May 21 deadline. Under the Canadian Space Agency Act, a president serves at the government’s pleasure for up to five years.
Joly said MacDonald brings “a strong understanding that space is crucial to our national and economic security,” and called him suited to lead the agency through “space exploration and sovereign capability development.” She also thanked Campbell for six years at the helm and Piedboeuf for steering the agency through the transition.
Seventeen years at NASA, from Ames to the administrator’s office
MacDonald studied economics at Queen’s University and the University of British Columbia, then earned a doctorate at the University of Oxford on the long-run economic history of American spaceflight. He is the author of The Long Space Age, a 2017 Yale University Press book arguing that private money has funded space exploration for far longer than the Sputnik-era story suggests. He discussed the book on SpaceQ’s podcast in 2018. Born in Canada, he holds Canadian and U.S. citizenship.
He worked at NASA for about 17 years, until December 2024. He started at the Ames Research Center designing small satellite missions, moved to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory to work on commercial space, and went on to headquarters as founding program executive of the Emerging Space Office and senior economic advisor in the Office of the Administrator. As chief economist, he helped shape the agency’s Moon to Mars strategy and the Artemis program, and served as program executive for the International Space Station National Laboratory. NASA gave him its Exceptional Service Medal in 2024.
Since leaving NASA, MacDonald has been a senior associate with the Aerospace Security Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a Washington think tank. SpaceQ had identified him in May as a potential candidate to replace Campbell.
MacDonald has already laid out an agenda for the agency
MacDonald spent much of this year speaking on Canadian conference stages about what the agency should do next. At Space Canada’s Horizons conference in May, held at CSA headquarters in Longueuil, Que., he told the sector that NASA’s decision to pause the Lunar Gateway left Canada’s flagship contribution without a home. “NASA no longer has a clear near-term use for the Canadarm3,” he said. “We need to rapidly pivot away from our gateway activities and focus immediately and with urgency on lunar surface robotics.”
He recommended the CSA redirect remaining Canadarm3 money toward surface robotics where it could, buy two or three rides on NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services landers to test Canadian robots on the Moon in 2027 and 2028, and quickly narrow the Lunar Utility Vehicle competition to two teams. He also pointed to space nuclear power, medical systems and food production as areas where Canadian firms could claim a role in NASA’s Moon base.
Two weeks earlier, at NordSpace’s Canadian Space Launch Conference in Ottawa, he walked through Canada’s rocket history, from the Black Brant sounding rocket to launches at Cape Parry in the Northwest Territories, as evidence the country can build its own orbital launch capability. “We all in this room, now, need to just get this done,” he said.
At SpaceBound in Gatineau last month, MacDonald relayed the views of about 40 Space Canada members he had met the day before. They see “a legitimate opportunity for Canada to lead the world in space-based Arctic northern infrastructure” as defence spending rises, he said, and want faster procurement, a steadier demand signal and “empowering program managers and delegating down authority.” Members also worried that government aversion to risk with new technology sometimes leads to “micromanagement.”
Campbell told the same Horizons conference in May that the CSA was shifting its procurement toward speed and iterative development and away from rigidly defined mission requirements. MacDonald now takes charge of that shift.