Rocket launch costs have dropped 96% since 1960. How low can they go?

Charles Q. Choi

Mon, July 20, 2026 at 9:00 AM EDT 4 min read

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The costs of space launch have fallen 96% in the past six decades and have the potential to plummet by nearly as much by 2040, a new study finds.

However, such an improvement might get hampered by a number of challenges, such as the rise of space debris in orbit or a single company monopolizing commercial space launch, researchers added.

Although previous analyses of space launch suggested that costs had dropped over time, one major problem with these prior studies was that they "considered the cost of the rockets, but not how much they launched during their lifetimes," study co-author Francesco Nicoli, an associate professor of political economy at the Politecnico University of Turin in Italy, told Space.com. This meant this earlier work failed to accurately track the average costs of reaching space.

In the new study, the researchers developed the largest dataset of rocket launches to date, covering 4,405 launches from 1960 to 2025. This included more than 330 different rocket configurations devised by developers in the United States, Russia, China, India, Europe, Japan, Australia, Brazil, Israel, Iran, South Korea and Ukraine.

The investigators found that, in 2024 U.S. dollars, the average cost of sending 2.2 pounds (1 kilogram) to orbit dropped from $87,023 in 1960 to $3,868 in 2025 — a decrease of 96%.

All in all, the rate at which the space-launch industry learned to reduce costs was among the fastest recorded in any industry to date, the investigators noted. They calculated that each time the cumulative payload of the entire space-launch industry doubled, the average cost of sending 2.2 pounds (1 kg) to orbit decreased by 21.2%.

This learning rate exceeds that seen with solar panels, "a technology that is now frequently taken as the benchmark for cost reduction," study co-author Alessio Terzi, an assistant professor of public policy at the University of Cambridge in England, told Space.com.

The researchers suggested two major causes behind this drop in costs. "First, the end of the Cold War and the shift to so-called 'New Space,' meaning the use of space for commercial purpose, seems to have accelerated the rate of learning — in the Cold War era, countries launched with their national launchers no matter the cost," Terzi said. "Second, our data shows an acceleration in the learning rate of space since the launch of the Falcon 9 of SpaceX, and the advent of reusability at scale."