When an industry experiences significant performance improvements and simultaneous cost reductions, disruptive innovation follows. The results ripple across sectors and drive the global economy forward. Steam power, automobiles, and personal computers are classic cases. Today, we are witnessing Moore’s Law – a term referring to the observation that the number of transistors in an integrated circuit roughly doubles every two years – at work in rocketry, driving down the cost per kilogram in space launch and promising astounding new possibilities in space operations. This development has significant economic and national security implications.
Elon Musk’s SpaceX has single-handedly forced the market price for launch services down by more than half, simply by approaching rocket production like a competitive manufacturing business. The price of flights to low-Earth orbit have dropped from over $300 million to less than $100 million. SpaceX’s reuse of first-stage boosters, payload fairings and other rocket components promises to cut this by another 40 percent or more. Commercial launches could easily fall below $50 million.
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