It costs 96% less to reach orbit than in 1960 — and a new study says the fall is far from over

Space 3 min 73 sources

A dataset of 4,405 launches finds the price of sending a kilogram to orbit dropped from $87,023 to $3,868, and could reach $300 by 2040 — if scale keeps compounding and no one corners the market.

Key takeaways

A new study of 4,405 launches finds the cost of reaching orbit fell 96% since 1960, and every doubling of everything ever launched cut the per-kilogram price another 21.2%.
That is faster cost-cutting than solar panels achieved, driven by commercial competition and SpaceX's reusable Falcon 9 — and it only continues if launch volume keeps climbing.
The fall could stall if orbital debris makes space dangerous, if one company corners the market, or if nations retreat to costly national rockets.

The cost of reaching space has fallen 96% in six decades, and a new study says it could fall by nearly as much again within fifteen years [1].

Researchers at the Politecnico University of Turin and the University of Cambridge built the largest dataset of rocket launches yet assembled — 4,405 launches from 1960 to 2025, across more than 330 rocket types from a dozen countries [1]. Measured in 2024 dollars, the average cost of sending one kilogram (2.2 pounds) to orbit dropped from $87,023 in 1960 to $3,868 in 2025 [1].

Earlier attempts to track this had a flaw, the authors said: they counted what each rocket cost, but not how much each rocket carried over its lifetime [1]. Once you divide total cost by total payload flown, a sharper pattern appears — and it follows one of the oldest rules in manufacturing.

The number under the number

The study found that every time the space industry’s cumulative payload doubled, the average cost per kilogram fell by 21.2% [1]. That is a learning curve: unit cost drops a steady amount with each doubling of everything ever made, as fixed costs spread and know-how, tooling, and process improve with volume.

That 21.2% rate beats solar panels — the technology usually held up as the benchmark for relentless cost decline [1]. Two things sped it up, the authors said: the end of the Cold War, which shifted launch from national-pride projects to commercial competition, and SpaceX’s Falcon 9, which made reusability routine and cheap at scale [1].

Volume is the engine

The mechanism only works if the volume keeps climbing — and it is. The global space economy hit a record $686 billion in 2025, up 12% on the year, with commercial activity making up 79% of it [2]. The fastest-growing upstream sectors are exactly the ones scale touches most: satellite manufacturing rose 67.2% and launch 49.4% in a single year [2].

Demand is pulling hard from every side. The US Space Force tripled the ceiling on one of its launch contracts, now seeking up to $30 billion in rockets [6]. Operators are filing for ever-larger constellations — Eutelsat outlined plans for a 528-satellite network on top of the 600-plus it already flies [9]. New builders keep entering: China’s Gravity-1, the world’s most powerful solid-fuel rocket, flew its third mission from a ship at sea, lofting nine satellites at once [29]. Each launch, each factory-built satellite, adds to the cumulative total that drives the next cost drop.

If the trend holds, the authors project the cost per kilogram falling to $1,600 by 2030 and $300 by 2040 [1].

Three ways the curve could stall

The study is careful: past performance guarantees nothing. Three forces could slow or reverse the fall [1].

The first is space junk. Debris travels at roughly 27,000 km/h, and collisions spawn more debris — the runaway “Kessler syndrome” that could make some orbits too dangerous to use, raising costs for everyone [1].

The second is concentration. SpaceX now flies about 75% of all the payload reaching orbit [1]. A learning curve needs volume spread across a working market; a single dominant seller has every incentive to raise prices, which would cut total payload flown and slow the very learning that made launch cheap [1].

The third is geopolitics. Rising tension pushes governments back toward launching on their own national rockets regardless of cost — the Cold War pattern the commercial era broke [1].

02 · Lesson · why it matters

Why the hundredth rocket costs a fraction of the first

Making a thing over and over doesn't just repeat it — each doubling of everything you've ever built quietly teaches you to make the next one cheaper.

The strange thing about the 96%

The number is easy to read as a story of clever engineers. In 1960, putting a kilogram into orbit cost about $87,000. Last year it cost under $3,900. Ninety-six percent gone.

But the researchers found the drop wasn’t tied to time, or to any one breakthrough. It was tied to a total. Every time the cumulative payload ever launched by the whole industry doubled, the average cost fell by the same slice — 21.2%. Not once. Every doubling.

The hundredth rocket is cheaper than the first not because the calendar moved, but because ninety-nine came before it.

A curve older than rockets

This has a name. It’s the experience curve, and it turned up first in aircraft factories in the 1930s. Someone noticed that the labour to build a plane fell a steady percentage each time total output doubled. The tenth plane was cheaper than the fifth. The four-thousandth was cheaper again.

The same pattern later showed up in computer chips, flat-screen televisions, wind turbines, solar panels. Different products, same shape: cost falls a fixed amount with each doubling of everything ever made. Space, the study found, is now climbing down this curve faster than solar panels — the technology everyone else uses as the benchmark.

Where the savings come from

The curve isn’t magic. It’s the sum of small, ordinary things that only happen when you make a lot.

The cost of designing a rocket gets spread over more launches, so each one carries less of it. Workers who’ve built the part fifty times build the fifty-first faster and waste less. A supplier who used to make ten valves a year retools to make ten thousand, and the valve gets cheaper. Failures teach fixes that never have to be paid for twice.

None of these come from thinking harder. They come from doing it again, and again, at volume. That is why the engine of the falling price is not genius. It’s throughput.

Cheap is a state, not a law

Here is the part that’s easy to miss. The curve makes the price look inevitable — as if space were simply getting cheaper the way water runs downhill. It isn’t.

The curve only turns while the volume climbs, and the volume only climbs while many buyers and sellers keep feeding it. The end of the Cold War helped, because it turned launch from a national-pride project — fly your own rocket whatever it costs — into a market where price mattered. SpaceX’s reusable Falcon 9 helped, because reusing a rocket is the cheapest way to add volume.

But the study names the flip side plainly. One company, SpaceX, now flies roughly three-quarters of everything that reaches orbit. A single dominant seller has every reason to charge more, not less. And charging more means launching less — which slows the very doubling that made launch cheap. The low price rests on an arrangement. Change who holds the volume, and you change the curve.

You are already downstream

You may never buy a launch. You ride the curve anyway.

The weather forecast on your phone comes from satellites. So does the map that reroutes you around traffic, the timing signal that lets card machines work, the broadband reaching towns no cable will ever pass. Each got more available as the cost of reaching orbit fell. You are a node on the far end of a curve you never touched.

Which means the risks in the study are your risks too. If debris makes some orbits too dangerous to use, or one seller decides scarcity pays better than scale, the price stops falling — and the bill for that doesn’t land on the rocket companies. It lands on everyone who quietly depends on what they carry up.

What the curve keeps and what it hides

The experience curve is one of the most reliable engines of cheapness humans have found. It has made powerful things ordinary — flight, computing, sunlight-into-electricity, and now the road to orbit.

But it carries its own trap folded inside it. Because the curve rewards whoever makes the most, it pulls toward concentration — and the one who ends up making the most is then the one who can decide to stop making it cheap. The same scale that opened space is the scale that could quietly close it again.

The next time a price seems to fall on its own, it’s worth asking what’s actually turning the curve, and who would gain by holding it still. Cheap is rarely the natural order of things. It’s usually a lot of people, making a lot of something, in a market none of them fully controls.

03 · Lab · your turn

Slide Down the Cost Curve

Add cumulative launch volume and watch the per-kilogram price fall a fixed slice per doubling, then hand the market to one seller and feel the curve stall.

04 · Hope · carry this

The cheapest road to orbit wasn't opened by one genius or one company — it was worn smooth by thousands of people in a dozen countries, each building one more rocket than the last. That kind of progress belongs to no one, which is exactly why it keeps arriving.