The fall in launch price per kilogram

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Between the Space Shuttle era and the 2020s, the advertised price of putting a kilogram into low Earth orbit fell by roughly an order of magnitude. The Shuttle, on any honest full-cost accounting that divides programme cost by mass delivered, sat in the tens of thousands of dollars per kilogram; a Falcon 9 at its published list price and full payload capacity sits in the low thousands. Three cautions belong with that number and are routinely dropped. First, price is not cost: a published price is a commercial offer shaped by competition and by a manifest dominated by the provider's own satellites, not a disclosure of marginal expense. Second, the denominator flatters the ratio, because few customers fill a Falcon 9 — the effective price for a payload that uses a third of the capacity is three times the headline. Third, the decline is concentrated in one vehicle from one provider; the average price across the global launch market has fallen far less than the best available price. The fall is real and it is the single most consequential change in the space economy since the 1960s, but it is a change in one segment that represents a small share of total industry revenue. Not a place.

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