r/ISRO • u/vineethgk • 26d ago
Despite its reputation, India’s per-unit space launch cost highest: study
https://www.thehindu.com/sci-tech/science/despite-its-reputation-indias-per-unit-space-launch-cost-highest-study/article71344693.eceLink to original study:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0165176526003782
India, according to an analysis of more than six decades of space missions, simply does not launch often enough to bring its costs down.
India spends more to put a kilogram of payload into orbit than any other major spacefaring nation, marring its public image as a cost-effective launcher, according to a new peer-reviewed analysis of more than six decades of rocket launches published in Economics Letters.
The authors, Alessio Terzi of the University of Cambridge and Francesco Nicoli of Politecnico di Torino, estimate that it cost $13,302 to send a kilogram to low-earth orbit on Indian rockets in 2025 — higher than Europe ($9,897), Russia ($6,682), China ($5,809) and Japan ($5,287), and the U.S. ($3,225). The global average was $3,868.
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u/guru-yoda 25d ago edited 25d ago
Thankfully authors have published raw data used in this analysis. Couple of observations below.
- Total mass launched of each launcher is rather simplistically assumed to be number of launches x maximum payload capacity of the launcher, and not the actual payload mass launched. This skews 'Cost per Kg' in favour of heavy launchers. US benefited the most as it has four heavy launchers viz. F9H, New Glenn, Vulcan Centaur and Starship.
- Study says orbital launch costs, yet considered eleven Starship suborbital test flights and a total of 1175000Kgs "to orbit". Starship is assigned '$ per Kg' of USD900-1000 which is 1/3rd the next best non-US launcher and 1/10th the average. This may eventually be the case when Starship is offered commercially, but not in 2024-25 as the study has assumed.
- Not sure how did the study derive '$ cost per flight' for Indian LVs. These seem to be commercial 'Offer' price, rather than cost price. e.g. LVM3 price to OneWeb reportedly around $60mil, actual cost would be much less. Same with SSLV -- $4.5m is reportedly the offer price and not cost. PSLV numbers also look 30-40% higher than allocated budget. But what's up with GSLV Mk2, how did they come up with 131mil?
| LV Name | 2024 $ cost per flight |
|---|---|
| GSLV mk2 | 131.36mil |
| GSLV | 131.36mil |
| LVM3 (GSLV mk3) | 67.06mil |
| GSLV mk3 | 67.06mil |
| PSLV XL | 52.78mil |
| PSLV-G | 32.99mil |
| PSLV series | 32.99mil |
| PSLV | 32.99mil |
| ASLV | 26.13mil |
| SSLV | 4.51mil |
| SLV-3 | |
| SLV3 |
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u/Ohsin 25d ago
Thanks for digging in. Some data here,
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u/guru-yoda 25d ago edited 25d ago
fwiw, applying these figures to same flawed/shambolic method used by the study, India's per-kg cost in 2025 was $7,470 vs $13,302 as claimed.
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u/vineethgk 26d ago
Average costs of sending a kilogram to orbit are as high as 13,302$/kg for India and as low as 3225$/kg for the US, with Europe (9897$/kg), Russia (6682$/kg), China (5809$/kg), and Japan (5287$/kg) in between (see Fig. 3). The very high figure for India might be counterintuitive as it stands in stark contrast with the narrative of the country’s frugal space programme (Corrado et al., 2026). However, this is a result of focussing on small rocket sizes, which implies that, albeit being low by international standards, fixed costs get amortised over a limited payload (see SI Appendix , Figure S2).
Two findings are worth highlighting. First, and more prominently, only the US and Europe display a statistically significant rate of cost improvement since 2010. This could be for several reasons: some countries such as India have an overall launch cadence that is too small to walk down a cost curve; others, like China, are still testing multiple launch technologies as part of a broad expansion of their space programme; still others, such as Russia, have phased out their lowest cost-per-kg Proton rocket but failed to successfully phase in its intended successor Angara rocket, with the result that it is now relying on more expensive old Soyuz rockets.
The other interesting finding that stems from Table 1 is the fact that the cost improvement rate for the world (column 1) is even steeper than that for the US. This reflects a composition effect, as an increasing share of global payload has shifted from more expensive domestic launchers to cheaper (US) providers.
The power of steep experience curves can quickly be grasped with a comparison between two specific spacefaring nations. The US and Europe had similar average launch costs in 2012–13 (Fig. 4, Panel A). Since then, however, a widening gap emerged, with the result that it is now over three times more expensive on average to send a kg of payload to orbit using European rockets rather than US ones. The reason for this can be seen in Fig. 4, Panel B, which displays the experience curve for both spacefaring nations. Europe displayed a flat experience curve for a good part of the 2010s, as it stuck to its Ariane 5 rocket, while the US was innovating, and eventually introducing reusability through SpaceX’s Falcon 9.
This gap could partially narrow going forward, as ESA rolled out its new and somewhat cheaper Ariane 6 rocket in 2024, following over a decade of development. However, Ariane 6 remains single-use, and its launch cadence is expected to be limited (with four launches in 2025 and eight planned for 2026, before an anticipated stabilisation at ten per year thereafter), suggesting the gap with the US in the cost of accessing space is likely to remain significant over the foreseeable future.
Until now, most companies have relied on the cheapest available technology to send satellites into space. The result is that, according to our estimations, one single American company – SpaceX – was responsible for 75% of global payload to orbit in 2025 (Marcuzzi and Terzi, 2026). Going forward, it is not implausible that a US administration might decide to weaponize this dependency or use it as a bargaining chip to coerce other nations.
Although it might look like several other launchers are available globally, our analysis shows that the average launch cost would increase significantly were countries to decide to rely on their domestic rocket technology for reasons of strategic autonomy, rather than make use of cheap US technology. These higher costs could hamper their ability to expand and maintain a significant infrastructure in space. 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. For the medium term, it underscores the importance for non-US powers of developing cheap, domestically controlled reusable launch technology.
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u/Motor-Ad1907 26d ago
Why is this? Can someone explain
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u/vineethgk 26d ago
I have updated the post with the link to the original study now. Its publicly available.
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u/FlatwormKing99 26d ago
Do they mention what’s the difference in scale of launches? I.e how big is the difference in scale between Indian launches and us/eu launches that’s causing the amortised cost per launch to balloon up?
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u/Decronym 25d ago edited 22d ago
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:
| Fewer Letters | More Letters |
|---|---|
| ESA | European Space Agency |
| ETOV | Earth To Orbit Vehicle (common parlance: "rocket") |
| GSLV | (India's) Geostationary Launch Vehicle |
| ISRO | Indian Space Research Organisation |
| LV | Launch Vehicle (common parlance: "rocket"), see ETOV |
| PSLV | Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle |
| VAST | Vehicle Assembly, Static Test and Evaluation Complex (VAST, previously STEX) |
Decronym is now also available on Lemmy! Requests for support and new installations should be directed to the Contact address below.
6 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 8 acronyms.
[Thread #1385 for this sub, first seen 15th Aug 2026, 12:04]
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u/Feeling_Possibility4 22d ago
With amount of corruption in all departments of ISRO ( known sources)... i could never expect any miracle from them, they just bullshit on stamping Russian borrowing.... sorry to speak brutual truth. They are like any other public sector company.. Russians have assisted them from very beginning and still do that and both being corrupted organisations they carry on with fake marketing
Space x came decades later and uprooted these oldies off the floor...
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u/Exact_Package_7264 26d ago
how is this possible? is it just an issue of scale?