In 1960, sending 1 kg to space cost $87,000.
Today? Just $3,800.
That's a 95% price crash in 65 years — and a new Cambridge study just mapped out exactly how it happened.
Stay with me, because the ending is wilder than the headline.
The team built the world's biggest rocket database ever — over 4,400 launches since Sputnik in 1957, across 16 space-faring nations.
And what they found breaks the usual narrative.
Everyone assumes solar power is the ultimate cost-crash story.
Turns out, rocket tech has an even steeper learning curve.
Less volume. Bigger drop. That's not normal.
It's called Wright's Law: the more you build something, the cheaper and better it gets. Space just proved it harder than anyone else.
Here's the twist nobody expected.
From the 1960s to the mid-90s, cost cuts barely came from better engineering.
Countries were just building dozens of experimental rockets and cherry-picking the cheap ones.
Efficiency wasn't the goal. National pride was.
Only after 1995 — when private companies entered the game — did the real technical learning kick in.
Learning rate jumped to 8% per generation.
⚡ Translation: competition beat Cold War muscle-flexing.
The researchers ran the numbers forward:
That's a 96% drop from today's price in under 15 years.
And here's the kicker — they calculated SpaceX alone could get there with just 80 flights of Starship, the reusable super-heavy rocket now mid-testing in 2026.
The whole forecast leans on one company.
SpaceX isn't just winning the space race — it's become the space race's baseline assumption.
The study's own warning:
"The world has become so reliant on a single company for cheap space access... this makes projecting the space economy particularly challenging."
One company's rocket schedule is now a variable in global economic forecasting.
Think about that.
Cheaper space isn't a sci-fi dream anymore.
It's a spreadsheet — with one company's name in every formula.
That's all for now!
