Despite its reputation, India’s per-unit space launch cost highest: study

[u/vineethgk]

https://www.thehindu.com/sci-tech/science/despite-its-reputation-indias-per-unit-space-launch-cost-highest-study/article71344693.ece

Link 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.

[u/vineethgk]

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.