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6h ago

Launch Costs Have Fallen 96% Since 1960, Study Finds

A steep learning curve driven by commercial reusability could push prices much lower if market structure and orbital safety remain stable.

Rocket launch costs are falling faster than steamship freight did in the 1800s — and a new study of every orbital launch since 1960 finds that every time total cargo volume doubled, the price per kilogram fell by 21.2 per cent.
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Overview

  • The PNAS Nexus study published July 14 assembled a production-weighted record of 4,405 launches from 1960–2025 and calculated that average launch cost per kilogram fell from $87,023 to $3,868, a 96% decline.
  • Using Wright’s Law the authors measured a 21.2% learning rate per doubling of cumulative payload, a pace steeper than many past technologies, and used that rate to produce conditional forecasts for 2030 and 2040.
  • If that learning trend holds the paper projects average costs near $1,600 per kilogram by 2030 and roughly $300 per kilogram by 2040, but the forecasts are explicitly sensitive to structural changes.
  • Researchers credit the post–Cold War commercialization of launch services and large-scale reusability—notably SpaceX’s Falcon 9 and Starship development—for accelerating cost declines, and note SpaceX now supplies roughly 75–80% of payload to orbit.
  • Key risks could stall or reverse the trajectory: rising orbital debris that raises safety and insurance costs, incentives for a dominant launcher to raise prices, and geopolitical moves to rebuild national launch capacity that may be costlier.