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A new dataset puts US launch costs at about $3,225 a kilogram and Europe's at roughly $9,900. The bind is what to do about it.
A single rocket family flew more than 82% of all mass delivered to orbit in 2024. Twelve years earlier, in 2012, the US share of yearly global payload to orbit had collapsed to less than 20%: a low point set after the Space Shuttle's retirement and well before Falcon 9 started flying often. A new peer-reviewed paper in Economics Letters, built by UK and Italian policy researchers and reported by Ars Technica's Eric Berger, traces the swing to a single mechanism: the reusable cost curve.
The United States now puts a kilogram in orbit for about $3,225, the paper's authors estimate. Japan pays about $5,287, China about $5,809, Russia about $6,682, and Europe about $9,900. India's $15,000 figure is a small-rocket artifact rather than a verdict on Indian engineering, the authors write; fixed costs are amortized over limited payload on smaller vehicles. The three inputs that drive the cost down are larger rockets, higher flight cadence, and reuse of the launch vehicle. The cost gap is the lever that makes the share swing matter. Orbital mass share is the new unit of account for who sets the price, the schedule, and the terms of access to space, and it shows up everywhere from satellite internet to Earth observation to national-security payloads. Cambridge researchers project space-cargo costs could fall more than 90% by 2040, deepening the pressure on any operator that does not move down the same curve.
The chart is two lines. The US share of yearly global payload fell from nearly 50% in 1995 to a sub-20% trough around 2012, then rebounded to a peak of more than 82% in 2024. Cumulative payload to orbit tells the same story in harder units: the United States has now more than doubled all of Russia's payloads to orbit since 1990 after pulling ahead in the early 2020s.
Europe is the most legible case in point. The continent has no domestic reusable vehicle at cadence. ESA's Themis, a suborbital demonstrator originally meant to perform low-altitude hop tests by 2022, has not yet left the ground, Berger's reporting notes. The bigger programmatic response is the European Launcher Challenge, a two-stage competitive tender under which ESA has preselected five challengers: Isar Aerospace, Maiaspace, Orbex (Orbital Express Launch), PLD Space, and Rocket Factory Augsburg. ESA has earmarked a target of about €169 million per challenger, roughly $185 million at recent exchange rates, covering launch services between 2026 and 2030 and a flight demonstration of an upgraded capacity.
The European Commission and Parliament moved in January 2026 to back the same direction. At the 18th European Space Conference, Commissioner for Defence and Space Andrius Kubilius and MEP Christophe Grudler awarded a €5 million (about $5.5 million) Parliament-funded Prize for Game-Changing Innovation for European Launch Solutions across five disruptive technologies, including a reusable aerospike upper stage and an autophage propulsion concept that consumes the rocket fuselage as fuel. Kubilius also announced a new €20 million grant, about $22 million, set to launch in 2026, and used the ceremony to make the reusable point explicit: "We need launchers that can be used again and again."
The authors of the Economics Letters paper put the bind in writing: "Looking specifically at Europe, for now the continent is stuck between a rock and a hard place, having to choose between continuing to depend on lower-cost American launch technology and relying on expensive, poorly scalable domestic technology to expand its strategic presence in space." That is a policy framing, not a verdict. Nations that decide to rely solely on their domestic rockets will see costs go up, and that is likely to slow efforts to expand space-based operations such as satellite constellations, the paper argues.
Three doors are open to Europe. Pooled ESA investment at the ministerial level can underwrite a reusable demonstrator at cadence, with the European Launcher Challenge's second-stage contract as the working instrument. Public-private reuse programs can pair agency anchor demand with private operator risk, on the model that turned SpaceX's early manifest into a flying fleet. Buyer-side procurement reform can let European ministries buy launch on terms, including schedule, payload priority, and sovereign data routing, that the lowest-cost commercial provider does not naturally offer. The same playbook is open to any non-US operator facing the same curve.
The next concrete milestone is the European Launcher Challenge's second-stage contract, due after the November 2025 ESA Council at ministerial level. After that, the watch is on Themis's first hop and on whether the Commission's new €20 million grant turns into flying hardware before 2030.