WIA Honors Molly Macauley with Lifetime Achievement Award – UPDATE

Women in Aerospace (WIA) is honoring Molly Macauley with its 2016 Lifetime Achievement Award.  It will be presented posthumously at the WIA Awards Dinner on October 13.  Her murder on July 8 remains unsolved. Resources for the Future (RFF), where she spent most of her career, will hold a memorial service on September 23.

Macauley was one of the few economists who specialized in studying the economic implications of space activities, especially earth observation satellites. After four years working at the Communications Satellite Corporation (COMSAT), she spent the rest of her career at RFF, a Washington-based think tank that focuses on the economics of natural resources.  She also was a visiting professor of economics at Johns Hopkins University for many years.

She was murdered while walking her dogs near her home in Baltimore.  The police said at the time there was no motive and no suspects. No further news has been forthcoming.

Macauley published widely and she was a member of the International
Editorial Board of the quarterly journal Space Policy.  Elsevier, the publisher of
Space Policy, is making the articles she wrote for the journal available for free for the remainder of this year and published tributes to her by other members of the Editorial Board and many space policy colleagues.  

RFF also has a tribute page and will hold a memorial service for her on September 23 at the Metropolitan Club in Washington, DC from 3:30-5:30 pm ET.  (All of Molly’s friends and colleagues are welcome, but please RSVP in advance to specialevents@rff.org.)

In its press release announcing the winners of its 2016 awards, WIA said that Macauley was being honored for “having successfully pioneered the field of ‘space economics’ over the lifetime of her professional career and contributing to academic and public policy impacts of linking economics with space science.”

The WIA Awards Dinner is on October 13 at the Ritz-Carlton Pentagon City in Arlington, VA.

Updated with RSVP instructions for Molly Macauley’s memorial service.