Space Launch Costs Could Fall 93% by 2040, Opening Orbit to New Industries

In July 2026, Cambridge economist Alessio Terzi and colleagues published the largest launch-cost dataset ever assembled — 4,400 rockets flown since 1960 — and projected that the price of putting a kilogram into orbit will fall from $3,868 last year to $273 by 2040, if the company driving the collapse does not become its own bottleneck

In July 2026, a research team led by Alessio Terzi, an assistant professor at Cambridge’s Bennett School of Public Policy, and Francesco Nicoli of the Politecnico Institute of Turin, published a paper in PNAS Nexus that stitched together 4,400 orbital launches from 1960 to 2025 — the largest global dataset of rockets ever assembled — and drew a curve that steepens rather than flattens. The cost of putting a kilogram into low Earth orbit, they wr…

Space launch costs could fall 93% by 2040, opening orbit to new industries

The cost of reaching orbit is on track to fall sharply, potentially transforming space from an expensive frontier into a broad commercial marketplace. New research projects that launch costs could drop 58 percent by 2030 and about 93 percent by 2040. The Cambridge-led study estimates that sending one kilogram of payload into low Earth orbit cost an average of $3,868 in 2025. That figure could fall to $1,569 by the end of this decade and as low a…