ending a kilogram to orbit cost roughly $55,000 - now much less

from
https://spacedaily.com/t-launch-cost-shuttle-reusable-rockets-starship-below-100-per-kg/

Sending a kilogram to orbit cost roughly $55,000 in the Space Shuttle 
era. Reusable rockets have brought the theoretical cost down to a few 
thousand dollars today. If Starship eventually achieves rapid full 
reusability, some projections put the figure below $100/kg — potentially 
turning access to orbit from an extraordinary expense into something 
approaching ordinary transportation.
Launch cost has fallen dramatically, but Shuttle, Falcon and Starship 
figures measure different things. The sub-$100/kg case still depends on 
full reuse, cadence and full payloads.

By Lachlan Brown

Published August 18, 2026 · How we edit

Sending a kilogram to orbit cost roughly $55,000 in the Space Shuttle 
era. Reusable rockets have brought the theoretical cost down to a few 
thousand dollars today. If Starship eventually achieves rapid full 
reusability, some projections put the figure below $100/kg — potentially 
turning access to orbit from an extraordinary expense into something 
approaching ordinary transportation.
A SpaceX reusable-rocket test vehicle descends under engine power during 
an early flight test. Photo by SpaceX via Pexels. Representative 
historical image; this is not an operational Falcon 9 or Starship mission.
Ilove a clean chart as much as anyone, and the history of launch cost 
seems to offer a beauty: about $55,000 to place a kilogram in low Earth 
orbit with the Space Shuttle, a few thousand dollars with modern 
commercial rockets, then perhaps less than $100 if Starship becomes 
rapidly and fully reusable.

The direction is real. The neatness is not.

Those three numbers come from different kinds of calculation. One is a 
fully burdened programme cost divided by maximum payload. Another 
combines an advertised launch price with a rocket’s theoretical 
capacity. The last is a projection resting on a vehicle and operating 
tempo that do not yet exist.

I do not say that to drain the excitement from the story. Reusability 
has already changed the economics of leaving Earth. I say it because the 
honest version is more useful: launch is becoming dramatically cheaper, 
while “cost per kilogram” remains a slippery unit that can conceal 
almost as much as it reveals.

The Shuttle’s $55,000 was not a ticket price
The familiar number comes from a NASA Ames analysis of falling launch 
costs. It assigned the Shuttle a cost of about $1.5 billion per launch 
and a maximum low-Earth-orbit payload of 27,500 kilograms. Divide the 
first figure by the second and you get $54,500 per kilogram, usually 
rounded to $55,000.

That is a legitimate benchmark, but it is not what every customer was 
invoiced for every kilogram. Shuttle missions carried people, 
life-support equipment, an orbiter that returned to Earth and hardware 
tailored to the job. The useful payload also changed with the 
destination. In the same paper, NASA calculated a cost of $93,400 per 
kilogram for cargo delivered to the International Space Station because 
the Shuttle could carry only 16,050 kilograms there.

This is the first rule of launch-cost comparisons: orbit is not one 
destination, and maximum capacity is not the same as typical delivered 
mass. The $55,000 figure tells us the scale of Shuttle economics. It 
does not reconstruct a universal Shuttle fare.

Falcon 9 changed what gets thrown away
NASA applied similar arithmetic to Falcon 9. It took SpaceX’s 
then-advertised price of $62 million and divided it by a maximum LEO 
payload of 22,800 kilograms, producing $2,720 per kilogram. On paper, 
that was about one twentieth of the Shuttle benchmark.

SpaceX still lists 22,800 kilograms as Falcon 9’s maximum payload to 
LEO. There is a revealing wrinkle, though: the company’s 2026 prospectus 
describes that capacity as the fully expendable figure. A mission that 
lands the booster reserves propellant for the return, reducing the 
performance available to the payload. The famous $2,720 calculation is 
therefore a useful theoretical benchmark, not a measurement of a 
particular reused Falcon 9 mission.

The achievement underneath it is nevertheless substantial. Falcon 9 
proved that an orbital-class first stage could fly back, land and be 
used repeatedly. SpaceX said in its 2026 prospectus that a booster had 
flown 34 times by the end of March. Engines, tanks, avionics and 
structure that once would have been discarded were having their 
production cost spread across dozens of missions.

Astronauts returning from six-month ISS missions come home measurably 
taller because the spine’s intervertebral discs are thought to expand 
without gravity compressing them, a stretch of up to two inches that 
reverses within days of a child-sized hug back on Earth
The Artful Age

Apollo 14 carried roughly 500 tree seeds around the Moon in 1971, they 
were germinated and planted in schoolyards and state capitols across 
America, and then nobody kept a proper list — until a NASA scientist 
started hunting the survivors and has now tracked down dozens still growing.

Some of the most promising places to search for alien life aren’t 
planets at all, but moons — because Europa and Enceladus keep oceans 
liquid beneath their ice partly through the gravitational squeezing of 
giant planets, an internal heat source that doesn’t care how far they 
are from the Sun.

That is the economic heart of reuse. Rocket propellant is comparatively 
cheap. Rocket hardware, the industrial system that builds it and the 
people who prepare it are not.

A kilogram does not have one market price
A small satellite operator cannot buy one kilogram at the full-rocket 
bulk rate. The payload needs an adapter, testing and integration. It 
needs the correct orbit and a place on a real launch schedule. Empty 
capacity on the wrong trajectory is not useful capacity.

SpaceX’s current small-satellite rideshare offer starts at $350,000 for 
50 kilograms to sun-synchronous orbit, with additional mass priced at 
$7,000 per kilogram. The starter package itself works out to $7,000 per 
kilogram, well above the familiar $2,720 Falcon benchmark and still far 
below Shuttle-era scale.

A useful reality check arrived in 2026 from researchers Alessio Terzi 
and Francesco Nicoli. Their PNAS Nexus study standardised data from more 
than 4,400 launches between 1960 and 2025. It estimated that the average 
cost of sending a kilogram to orbit fell from $87,023 in 1960 to $3,868 
in 2025. Their central model projected about $1,600 by 2030 and $300 by 
2040.

That broad dataset is a better portrait of the market than one rocket’s 
ideal ratio. It also reminds us that price and internal cost are 
different. A launch company may save money by reusing a booster without 
passing every dollar to customers. Demand, available slots, contracts 
and competition still shape the price.

On 13 April 2029, a roughly 375-metre asteroid named Apophis will pass 
closer to Earth than some of our own satellites — just 32,000 kilometres 
above the surface — and new calculations suggest up to 90% of humanity 
could potentially see it cross the sky with the naked eye.

A rocky planet called TOI-561 b completes an entire year in under 11 
hours and orbits so close to its star that its surface is thought to 
contain a vast magma ocean. Its star is roughly 10 billion years old — 
twice the age of the Sun — yet after billions of years of extreme 
radiation, James Webb found compelling evidence that the planet still 
has a thick atmosphere.

Below $100 is a scenario, not a present quote
SpaceX says Starship is designed to carry more than 100 tonnes to orbit 
in a fully reusable configuration. The arithmetic is easy. A $10 million 
flight carrying 100 tonnes gives $100 per kilogram. A $2 million flight 
gives $20.

The latter figure traces to a 2019 projection, reported by TechCrunch, 
in which Elon Musk put eventual Starship operating cost at roughly $2 
million per launch, including about $900,000 for propellant. That was an 
aspiration made years before the present vehicle, not an audited cost or 
a public customer price.

SpaceX’s own 2026 prospectus makes a more restrained claim. The company 
says it aims to reduce the cost of reaching orbit by 99 per cent or more 
relative to a historical benchmark of $18,500 per kilogram. A 99 per 
cent reduction is $185 per kilogram. “Or more” leaves room for double 
digits, but does not promise them.

Every optimistic Starship estimate rests on the same stack of 
conditions. Both stages must return and refly with limited inspection 
and refurbishment. Launches must occur often enough to spread pad, 
factory, workforce and development costs across a large number of 
flights. Customers must provide enough payload to use that enormous 
capacity. A half-empty rocket doubles the cost per delivered kilogram 
before anything else changes.

Reuse changes economics, not orbital physics
When I wrote about why reaching orbit is mostly about moving sideways at 
roughly 28,000 kilometres per hour, what stayed with me was the 
stubbornness of the physics. Reusability does not reduce the speed a 
spacecraft needs. It changes how much expensive machinery we discard 
while reaching it.

This is where the airline analogy helps, then breaks. An airliner would 
be absurdly costly if its engines and airframe were scrapped after every 
journey. A rocket designed to fly again should gain the same basic 
economic advantage. But a rocket also carries its oxidiser, operates 
near extreme structural margins and returns through punishing heat. The 
inspection burden, heat-shield life and turnaround time matter as much 
as whether the vehicle lands.

I made a similar point when examining Starship’s still-unproven 
ship-to-ship refuelling system. The programme has demonstrated difficult 
pieces of its architecture. It has not yet demonstrated rapid full-stack 
reuse. We should be able to admire real progress without quietly 
treating the remaining milestones as completed.

Cheap launch changes design before it makes space ordinary
If launch eventually falls below $100 per kilogram, the first 
transformation may be in engineering culture. Spacecraft teams spend 
years shaving mass because every kilogram carries such a large transport 
penalty. A much cheaper ride allows thicker shielding, larger propellant 
margins, more standard components and spare hardware. Stations, depots 
and large telescopes become easier to assemble when lifting beams, tanks 
and tools is no longer the dominant expense.

That still does not make a working satellite ordinary freight. Design, 
testing, integration, insurance and operations remain. Human travel adds 
life support, abort capability and stringent safety requirements. The 
launch price of a person’s body mass tells us almost nothing about the 
cost of carrying that person safely.

Higher cadence also carries obligations. In an earlier piece on orbital 
debris creating more orbital debris, I argued that cheaper access and 
responsible stewardship have to grow together. Launching more hardware 
can enable extraordinary science and infrastructure. It can also 
increase congestion unless tracking, disposal and traffic coordination 
keep pace.

So I would keep the dramatic falling curve, but label it honestly. 
Shuttle’s $55,000 and today’s few-thousand-dollar range are useful 
markers of a genuine transformation. Starship below $100 is a plausible 
projection only if full reuse, rapid turnaround, high cadence and heavy 
utilisation all arrive together.

That is not ordinary transportation yet. It is the engineering 
proposition that might one day make orbit feel less extraordinary.


Free guide from Space Daily
The Universe in 12 Numbers
Twelve figures that put your place in the cosmos into staggering 
perspective — with real imagery from NASA, Hubble & Webb. Pop in your 
email and we’ll send you the free PDF.

[email protected]
Send it to me
Free. Includes The Brief, our weekly email. Unsubscribe anytime.
Standards

Space Daily articles are edited and fact-checked before publication. We 
use AI tools in the newsroom. See our editorial standards and masthead.

Written by

Lachlan Brown
Lachlan Brown is a co-founder of Brown Brothers Media and one of Space 
Daily's two publishers. He is the author of several books on Buddhism, 
mindfulness, and relationships, and oversees content operations and 
publishing strategy across the network. At Space Daily, Lachlan focuses 
on the Mind & Meaning pillar — the psychology of ambition, isolation, 
and meaning under extremes.

More from this author →