Industry Spending Analysis

This page contains an analysis of trends relating to industry spending and changes in major players over the past three decades.

So, what's new?

We begun our spending analysis with a simple hypothesis: it was our belief that over the past 25 years, the cost per mission or launch has decreased over time, even as spending across the industry has continued to rise. To test our hypothesis, we developed a set of two line-charts. The first chart (left) illustrates the changes in total industry spending over time, while the second (right) shows changes in cost per launch. These charts appeared to clearly support our hypothesis, which left us with another question: why? What changed in the space industry to change the spending landscape in this way? Or, perhaps more importantly, who changed the industry?

After seemingly confirming our original hypothesis with just two visualizations, we immediately jumped to conclusions. We thought it must be updates in rocket technology, such as reusable rockets or new materials, that were leading to a decreased cost per launch. But when we took a step back to consider the changing industry landscape, we realized that innovation may only be part of the underlying reasons for these changes. How has the number of organizations in the space industry changed in recent years? We created another line-chart to find out. It was evident that there were far more organizations launching rockets in the last few years than even just one decade ago. We thought it was possible that the increased number of launches might be bringing the average cost per launch down, and decided to investigate further.

First we needed to better understand the industry and its biggest players. More specifically, we need to learn how that landscape has changed over time. We developed this "Bar Chart Race" graphic to visualize the biggest spenders over the past 30 years. It was clear that NASA had always been a leader in this space, but this was the first indication that their domiminance is not what it used to be. SpaceX saw unprecedented growth in recent years, and the gap between NASA and other organizations is closing fast. Press "Replay" in the bottom right corner of the graph, and watch how quickly other organizations approach NASA's total spending in recent years.

We've established that NASA is leading the way in terms of total spending, but how about cost per launch? How do their costs compare with other major players in the industry? Try adding NASA to the selection of organizations in the line-chart below, and see how their spending per mission compares. Pretty crazy, right? Not only are the other companies listed leaders in the industry (in terms of total spending and number of launches -- more on that later), but they are all working on developing reusable rocket technology, suggesting that our initial theory about a decrased cost per launch for reusable rockets may have been a reasonable assumption.

To recap, NASA is clearly leading the way in total industry spending and cost per launch. Is it safe to assume they're also leading the way in the number of missions they're launching? Not exactly. The chart below shows the market share of launches by the top ten organizations (in terms of number of launches) over the last thirty years. Notice anything interesting? NASA doesn't make the cut. Feel free to move your cursor over the visualization below for more information about the changes in share of global launches in the past few decades. One insight that we found interesting is not just which companies are present, but how the share of launches has changed in recent years. In earlier buckets, the distribution of launches was spread much more evenly comapred to the most recent ten years, when organizations like SpaceX and CASC have asserted their dominance.

So who are the leaders in the industry today, and what does this tell us about the causes of the spending trends that we identified earlier? Well, as we saw in the last visualization, the leaders today are clearly SpaceX and CASC. Although it's important to note that SpaceX has facilitated 150+ more launches than CASC in the past five years (hover your cursor over each point in the chart for the exact number of launches). Back to the spending question: what can we say about the rockets being launced? For starters, at least four of the top five organizations by number of launches are developing some form of reusable rocket technology, which could be a key factor in decreased costs per launch. One other factor that may be contributing to decreased launch costs is the scope of these missions. Instead of larger-scale missions, like putting astronauts on the moon, many of these companies are traveling shorter distances, and in less time. ULA, for example, is primarily focused on getting satellites into Earth's orbit. Satellite launches may costs tens to hundreds of millions of dollars, which may seem high, but this pales in comparison to the billions of dollars spent on the first moon landing and similar missions sending humans to space in recent years.

In conclusion, the incredible boom in the number of organizations involved in space exploration, and the corresponding rise in number of launches, is very likely to be the cause of the sudden increase in total industry spending in recent years. When it comes to changing costs per launch, however, it's not so simple. Based on our analysis, we believe that the biggest factors for the decreasing trend in cost per launch across the industry are changes in the market, such as a higher number of organizations with different objectives and therefore often lower costs, and technological innovations that reduce waste and lower costs for individual missions. More research will likely be necessary to determine the true effects of these changes and others, and to predict trends in industry spending moving forward.