SpaceX’s hold over orbit matches East India Company’s grip on maritime trade

The United States now relies heavily on private launchers for its space access. Last year, 94% of all US launches were done by SpaceX. The rise of private spacefaring has driven a fall in launch costs, says Terzi.

The average cost of launching a kilogram of cargo into low Earth orbit has plummeted in recent years, falling from $15,000 per kilo in the early 2000s to just $4,000 by 2025, according to previous work by Terzi and colleagues.

While, historically, space launch vehicles were one and done, the advent of reusable technology, spearheaded by SpaceX from 2016 onwards, changed the market: more launches meant operational refinement and lower costs.

SpaceX also "manufactured its own demand" by building Starlink: thousands of satellites - and hundreds of rocket launches - to provide broadband in remote areas. Competitors lack both reusable systems and this self-perpetuating market.

"Each successful mission allows SpaceX to become faster and more cost-effective, pushing competitors further to the periphery each year"

_{Dr Alessio Terzi}

This has seen SpaceX's share of global payload launched into orbit jump from below 10% in 2014 to approaching 80% last year. With close to 10,000 satellites already up, and 42,000 planned, SpaceX is fast absorbing orbital slots and radio frequencies needed by start-up competitors, creating more barriers to market entry.

As with East India companies, SpaceX is a private firm deeply embedded in national strategy through military and communications objectives, argue the researchers.

It operates in a region with little authority, creating its own rules, as did colonial-era companies, and is on track to manage much of the access to vital spacefaring waystations such as the Moon, just as the trading companies controlled key ports.

To prevent the dangerous return of corporate-led governance for the space age, Terzi says the US government should use its purchasing power to get competition and data access conditions written into space contracts while there's still time, and maintain alternative space launch capacities for back-up.

He argues that the US government should take a public equity stake in SpaceX, as it did with Intel over semiconductor manufacturing, and work with its Artemis Accord allies to ensure the entire international bloc doesn't end up reliant on a handful of private providers.

"The logic of the space race pushes governments to support corporate champions, just as the logic of colonial competition pushed early modern states to empower their chartered companies," added Terzi.

"The East India Company was eventually reined in, but only after famines, financial crises, and political scandals made it impossible to ignore. By then it had been running parts of India for a century."

"We know what the East India Company became. We can put structures in place to keep its twenty-first-century successor from the same fate. The window to act is currently open, but history suggests it will not stay that way for long."

The erosion of state power is already playing out, says Terzi. Last summer, after a personal dispute, Donald Trump threatened to cut SpaceX's government contracts. Musk then threatened to decommission the Dragon capsule, which would have effectively cut the US government off from the International Space Station.

The Working Paper ' Outsourcing the final frontier: Space X, the East India Company and the political economy of space ' is online now.

Top image: A SpaceX Falcon Heavy passes the American Flag located at NASA's Launch Complex 39 Press Site as it launches the NOAA GOES-U weather satellite in June 2024. Credit: Brandon Moser via Getty.