Europe launch costs triple US as SpaceX dominates

A new study published in Economics Letters on August 14, 2026 finds that SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket has dramatically reshaped the global launch market, pushing the United States to more than 82 percent of worldwide payload mass in 2024. Public policy researchers from the United Kingdom and Italy analyzed more than 6,700 launches from 1960 to 2025 to quantify the impact of the rocket’s reusability and high flight rate.

The United States has now more than doubled all of Russia’s cumulative payload to orbit since 1990, a reversal from the mid-2010s when Russia led. Between 1995 and 2012, the US share of global payload collapsed from almost 50 percent to less than 20 percent, but it accelerated rapidly after the Falcon 9 ramp-up in the early 2020s. SpaceX now launches more than three-quarters of all mass into orbit, including payloads for direct competitors such as Amazon, Northrop Grumman, AST Space Mobile, and OneWeb.

Cost disparities are stark. The researchers estimate the average cost per kilogram to orbit in the United States is $3,225, compared to $5,287 in Japan, $5,809 in China, $6,682 in Russia, and $9,897 in Europe. India is highest at nearly $15,000 per kilogram, a figure the authors attribute to small rocket sizes that spread fixed costs over limited payload. A decade ago, US and European launch costs were similar; today Europe’s are three times higher.

The study warns that nations relying solely on domestic rockets will see costs rise, potentially slowing satellite constellation efforts. Europe is described as "stuck between a rock and a hard place," forced to choose between lower-cost American launch technology and expensive, poorly scalable domestic options. The authors note that virtually all new commercial rockets under development incorporate some reuse, but Europe’s efforts have lagged: the European Space Agency’s Themis suborbital hop test program, originally slated for low-altitude tests by 2022, has yet to get off the ground.