Space · Launch Economics

Cost per kg to LEO

The cheapest ride to orbit barely improved for forty-three years, then Falcon 9.

Ended — The CSIS record ends here; Starship promises far lower and publishes no price to plot.

• The record, not the average. FY21 dollars
• Saturn V: $5,400/kg back in 1967
• Shuttle was 12× worse than Saturn V
• Forty-three years for one halving

The popular story is that launch costs fell steadily until reusability broke them. The data says something stranger. This is a record line, read like a world record: the lowest dollar-per-kilogram any vehicle had yet achieved on a dedicated launch to low Earth orbit, from the CSIS Aerospace Security Project’s survey of 61 launch vehicles, each entered at its first successful launch and priced in FY21 dollars so inflation is already out of it. The long flat stretches are the point, because a record only moves when someone beats it, and this one barely moved for decades. Saturn V set $5,400 a kilogram in 1967 and stood unbeaten for eighteen years, because it was enormous and cost per kilogram rewards size. The Space Shuttle, the vehicle meant to make access routine through reuse, came in at $65,400 a kilogram: twelve times worse than the rocket it replaced. From Saturn V to Falcon 9 in 2010, across forty-three years, the record improved just over twofold. Humanity halved the price of orbit once, and took four decades doing it. The full 56-year fall is about tenfold, and most of it was already banked before Falcon 9 flew: the record stood at $2,600 by 2010, so the eight years since deliver about a quarter of the total fall — the fastest stretch since 1967, though still slower per year than the 1962–67 collapse from $14,900 to $5,400. Reusability did eventually break the curve, but the Shuttle is the standing proof that reuse alone was never the reason. One honest caveat on that first point: Saturn V’s exact figure depends on how you count it, flyaway cost or full mission, design payload or the record 140-tonne haul that counted the spent upper stage, with defensible estimates running from roughly $5,000 to $23,000 a kilogram in today’s money. What makes the comparison hold is that CSIS applies the same method to all 61 vehicles. The line stops in 2018 where CSIS’s data ends; Starship promises far lower and has published no price per kilogram to plot.

Source: CSIS Aerospace Security Project (Roberts)

Download the data: launch_cost.csv · launch_cost.json

All curves · The chart is drawn in your browser and needs JavaScript. Every number it plots is in the table above.