A decade ago, SpaceX began to land the first stages of the Falcon 9 rocket with some regularity, but it’s only within the last five years that the company has begun flying the rocket dozens and then hundreds of times a year.
As a result, SpaceX has very rapidly become responsible for more than three-quarters of all mass launched into orbit. Much of this is the company’s Starlink satellites, but due to cost and the lack of alternatives, SpaceX has also stepped up to launch payloads from all comers, including direct competitors such as Amazon, Northrop Grumman, AST Space Mobile, OneWeb, and more.
New research is beginning to quantify just how much the introduction of the Falcon 9 rocket, the adoption of reuse, and the vehicle’s high cadence have upended the global launch market.
Cumulative payload to orbit
Public policy researchers based in the United Kingdom and Italy have published new research in Economics Letters that showcases the marked changes wrought by the Falcon 9 by mining a dataset of more than 6,700 launches from 1960 to 2025.
One of the more striking findings comes in the cumulative payload to orbit by nation. From 1990 to the early 2000s, the United States and the Soviet Union tracked fairly closely to one another. Then, in the wake of the Space Shuttle Columbia accident in 2003, Russia began to pull ahead. This trend slowly reversed course in the mid-2010s and then, amid the Falcon 9 ramp up in the early 2020s, the United States pulled ahead dramatically.
Just a handful of years later, the United States has now more than doubled all of Russia’s payloads to orbit since 1990.
“Another way to look at it is to analyze the shares of yearly global payload captured by selected spacefaring nations,” the authors write. “Between 1995 and 2012, the US share of global payload collapsed from almost 50 percent to a trough of less than 20 percent, far below Russia and only a few percentage points above China and Europe. Since then, it accelerated rapidly to a peak of over 82 percent in 2024.”
Launch costs disparity
SpaceX has also made significant gains in controlling costs compared to other nations. A decade ago, the United States and Europe had similar launch costs. Today, according to publicly available data, launch costs in Europe are now three times higher than for comparable payloads in the United States.
The researchers estimate that the average cost of sending a kilogram of payload to orbit in the United States is now $3,225, compared to higher costs elsewhere: Japan ($5,287), China ($5,809), Russia ($6,682), and Europe ($9,897). India is higher still at nearly $15,000 a kilogram.
“The very high figure for India might be counterintuitive as it stands in stark contrast with the narrative of the country’s frugal space program,” the authors write. “However, this is a result of focusing on small rocket sizes, which implies that, albeit being low by international standards, fixed costs get amortized over a limited payload.”
The key factors in bringing down costs are larger rockets, increased cadence, and reuse of launch vehicles.
“Poorly scalable domestic technology”
As for what other countries should do about this, the researchers assert that nations in Europe and elsewhere that decide to rely solely on their domestic rockets for launch needs will see their costs go up, which could slow their efforts to expand space-based operations such as satellite constellations. This leaves policymakers in a difficult position.
“Looking specifically at Europe, for now the continent is stuck between a rock and a hard place, having to choose between continuing to depend on lower-cost American launch technology and relying on expensive, poorly scalable domestic technology to expand its strategic presence in space,” the authors write.
Ultimately, to remain competitive, spacefaring nations will need to develop better and more modern launch capabilities. The United States is far and away the current leader of reusable launch, and virtually all new commercial rockets under development incorporate some aspect of reuse. Chinese firms are similarly pushing forward with this technology. To date, Europe’s efforts have been slow and stodgy.
For example, a European Space Agency program to demonstrate small, suborbital hops called Themis was originally supposed to perform low-altitude hop tests by 2022. So far, the vehicle has yet to get off the ground.
