A decade ago, SpaceX began to land the first stages of the Falcon 9 rocket with some regularity, but it’s only within the last five years that the company has begun flying the rocket dozens and then hundreds of times a year.

As a result, SpaceX has very rapidly become responsible for more than three-quarters of all mass launched into orbit. Much of this is the company’s Starlink satellites, but due to cost and the lack of alternatives, SpaceX has also stepped up to launch payloads from all comers, including direct competitors such as Amazon, Northrop Grumman, AST Space Mobile, OneWeb, and more.

New research is beginning to quantify just how much the introduction of the Falcon 9 rocket, the adoption of reuse, and the vehicle’s high cadence have upended the global launch market.

Cumulative payload to orbit

Public policy researchers based in the United Kingdom and Italy have published new research in Economics Letters that showcases the marked changes wrought by the Falcon 9 by mining a dataset of more than 6,700 launches from 1960 to 2025.

One of the more striking findings comes in the cumulative payload to orbit by nation. From 1990 to the early 2000s, the United States and the Soviet Union tracked fairly closely to one another. Then, in the wake of the Space Shuttle Columbia accident in 2003, Russia began to pull ahead. This trend slowly reversed course in the mid-2010s and then, amid the Falcon 9 ramp up in the early 2020s, the United States pulled ahead dramatically.

Just a handful of years later, the United States has now more than doubled all of Russia’s payloads to orbit since 1990.

“Another way to look at it is to analyze the shares of yearly global payload captured by selected spacefaring nations,” the authors write. “Between 1995 and 2012, the US share of global payload collapsed from almost 50 percent to a trough of less than 20 percent, far below Russia and only a few percentage points above China and Europe. Since then, it accelerated rapidly to a peak of over 82 percent in 2024.”