Falcon 9 upended the launch market: US now doubles Russia in cumulative orbital mass

A decade ago, SpaceX began landing the first stages of the Falcon 9 rocket with some regularity, but it is only within the last five years that the company has started flying the vehicle dozens and then hundreds of times per year. As a result, SpaceX has rapidly become responsible for more than three-quarters of all mass launched into orbit. Much of this is the company's own Starlink satellite constellation, but because of low cost and a lack of alternatives, SpaceX has also stepped up to launch payloads for just about anyone, including direct competitors such as Amazon, Northrop Grumman, AST Space Mobile, OneWeb, and others.

New research is beginning to quantify just how much the introduction of the Falcon 9, the adoption of reusable first stages, and the rocket's high flight cadence have upended the global launch market. Public policy researchers based in the United Kingdom and Italy have published a study in the journal Economics Letters that highlights the dramatic changes brought by the Falcon 9. The team mined a dataset of more than 6,700 launches spanning from 1960 to 2025.

One of the most striking findings concerns cumulative payload mass delivered to orbit by nation. From 1990 through the early 2000s, the United States and Russia tracked fairly closely to one another. Then, in the aftermath of the Space Shuttle Columbia accident in 2003, Russia began to pull ahead. This trend slowly reversed course in the mid-2010s and, amid the Falcon 9 ramp-up in the early 2020s, the United States surged far ahead. Just a few years later, the US has now more than doubled Russia's total payload mass to orbit.

The authors also point out that Europe is trapped between a rock and a hard place. On the one hand, European launchers cannot compete with SpaceX on price or flight rate. On the other, Europe cannot simply abandon its own rockets without losing sovereign access to space, which is seen as a strategic necessity. This leaves the continent in a difficult position as it watches the US dominate the market while Europe struggles to keep its own launch industry viable. The study underscores how a single company's engineering choices — reusability and high cadence — have reshaped the economics and geopolitics of space access in less than a decade.