SpaceX Now Controls Orbit the Way the East India Company Once Controlled the Seas, Cambridge Economists Warn

In the 1820s, one chartered company moved roughly 72 percent of everything shipped between Europe and Asia. It ran armies, minted money, governed provinces, and answered to almost no one until famine and scandal finally forced a reckoning that took the better part of two centuries. Last year, a single private firm launched around 75 percent of everything humanity sent into space. The firm is SpaceX, and the economist drawing that parallel thinks the resemblance is not a coincidence but a warning.

Alessio Terzi, at the University of Cambridge’s Bennett School of Public Policy, has spent the past year measuring two things that turn out to be tightly bound together: how fast the cost of reaching orbit is falling, and how completely one company has come to dominate the route. The first trend is arguably the most hopeful economic story in space. The second may be the most worrying. They are, he argues, the same story.

The Cheapest Frontier in History

Start with the costs. Working with Francesco Nicoli of the Politecnico di Torino, Terzi assembled the largest standardized dataset of rocket launches ever compiled, 4,405 of them stretching from 1960 to 2025, and fed it through a piece of statistical machinery called Wright’s Law. The result is one of the steepest cost curves ever measured for any technology. Every time humanity doubles the total mass it has ever hauled into orbit, the average price of sending up one more kilogram drops by about 21 percent. In absolute terms, the cost has collapsed from roughly $87,000 a kilogram in 1960 to $3,868 last year, and on the pair’s central projection it falls to around $300 by 2040. Steeper than the steamships that stitched the 19th-century world together. Steeper, at comparable scale, than solar panels.

“Space is no longer a science-fiction fantasy or a purely scientific pursuit, it is becoming a marketplace,” Terzi says. And a marketplace, once cheap enough, invites all sorts of tenants: orbital factories drawing fibre-optic cable in microgravity, asteroid mining, solar power beamed down from above, perhaps one day the offshoring of Earth’s dirtiest industries beyond the atmosphere altogether.

Those savings did not come chiefly from the Space Race, when governments spent with something close to abandon. They came after it. Splitting the record at 1989, the researchers found costs fell more than two-and-a-half times faster once the Cold War ended and commercial money flooded in. During the government-led decades, each doubling of payload bought roughly a 17 percent cost cut; afterward, closer to 44 percent. “State-led competition during the Cold War did not foster cost efficiency on the same scale as the ensuing era of international space cooperation and private sector involvement,” Nicoli says. National prestige, it turns out, is an expensive way to fly.

The Company That Manufactured Its Own Demand

But the very forces that drove prices down concentrated the market to a degree with almost no modern parallel. That is the argument of a separate working paper Terzi wrote with the historian Stefano Marcuzzi, comparing SpaceX with the great colonial trading companies of the Age of Sail. SpaceX’s share of global payload has rocketed from below 10 percent in 2014 to nearly 80 percent last year, and 94 percent of all US launches in 2025 were its own. Reusable rockets, which SpaceX pushed into the mainstream from 2016, made each flight cheaper; cheaper flights meant more launches; more launches meant more refinement still. The firm then, in Terzi’s phrase, manufactured its own demand, building the Starlink constellation, thousands of satellites needing hundreds of launches, with tens of thousands more planned. “Each successful mission allows SpaceX to become faster and more cost-effective, pushing competitors further to the periphery each year,” Terzi says.

The comparison is deliberately unsettling. “Space is becoming an economic frontier governed by one or two corporations, just as the world’s oceans once were,” Terzi argues, adding that weak international rules and geopolitical rivalry let a private firm acquire power that ought to belong to states. He’s careful to note this is his reading, drawn from a policy paper rather than the peer-reviewed cost study, and reasonable people will disagree about how far a 17th-century analogy can stretch. Not everyone will accept that a launch provider is a colonial governor in waiting.

Yet the dependency is real, and it cuts both ways. Last summer, after a personal falling-out, President Trump threatened to strip SpaceX of its government contracts; Elon Musk countered by threatening to decommission the Dragon capsule, which would have cut the United States off from the International Space Station. As Terzi puts it: “The US is caught in a trap. Reining in SpaceX would slow America down in the race with China, so no US administration has a strong incentive to do it.” The company that made space cheap is also the company Washington can least afford to cross.

A Window That Won’t Stay Open

There is a further wrinkle, and it complicates the cheap-forever story. Most of the cost savings the paper documents came not from any single rocket getting better but from payload shifting onto cheaper launchers, which means a monopolist has every incentive to charge what the market will bear rather than pass its savings on. Costs are what it takes to fly; prices are what you are charged, and the two can drift a long way apart. Add geopolitics, with wary governments retreating to pricier home-grown rockets for strategic autonomy, and orbital debris, the swelling cloud of junk that could make low orbit hazardous, and the smooth downward curve starts to look less inevitable.

Terzi’s prescription is not to break SpaceX but to hem it in while that is still possible: write competition and data-access rules into government contracts, keep backup launch capacity alive, perhaps even take a public equity stake as Washington did with Intel, and coordinate with allies so the whole Western bloc does not end up leaning on one provider. History, he warns, offers a narrow window. “The East India Company took two centuries to bring under control. Space doesn’t have that long,” he says.

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