$100/kg: Unlocking the Orbital Economy

Forget revenue projections. Forget market caps. If you want to understand when the space economy becomes truly explosive you need to track one number: the cost to put a kilogram into low-Earth orbit.

Right now, that number is $2,720. On a Falcon 9. SpaceX’s Starship is targeting under $100. That gap — roughly 27 times — is not a footnote. It’s the difference between a space economy measured in hundreds of billions and one measured in tens of trillions.

Here’s why.

What $2,720/kg Can Buy You

At current Falcon 9 prices, you can do remarkable things. You can build Starlink, a constellation of nearly 9,500 satellites generating an estimated $18.7 billion in 2026 revenue. You can launch Planet Labs imaging satellites. You can send NASA payloads to the International Space Station.

What you cannot do — profitably — is a long list of things that would define a truly mature orbital economy.

You cannot economically manufacture most products in space. Even products that benefit dramatically from microgravity — ultra-pure semiconductor wafers, ZBLAN fiber optics, certain pharmaceutical crystals — face brutal arithmetic. If getting a kilogram to orbit costs $2,720, getting it back costs even more, and your yields are uncertain, your cost of goods is punished before you’ve made a single unit.

You cannot build orbital data centers at competitive economics. A modest data center represents thousands of tons of infrastructure. At $2,720/kg, building one in orbit costs orders of magnitude more than building on the ground — before you’ve accounted for thermal management, radiation hardening, and maintenance.

You certainly cannot make space asset custody broadly viable, the mission of SpaceVault. The market for securing high-value assets in orbit — financial instruments, digital assets, irreplaceable data — exists conceptually. But at $2,720/kg, the infrastructure costs are prohibitive for most potential participants.

The Three Price Tiers

Think of launch costs as unlocking successive layers of economic viability.

Starship: What We Actually Know in 2026

SpaceX filed its IPO this year. The S-1 is perhaps the most candid financial document ever produced, and it contains a number worth dwelling on: SpaceX spent $3 billion on Starship R&D in 2025 alone, and $930 million in Q1 2026. That’s not the spending profile of a company hedging its bets.

The filing confirms Starship is expected to begin payload delivery to orbit in the second half of 2026. The company plans to use it to launch next-generation Starlink V2 satellites, and explicitly names orbital AI data centers as a target application.

The math follows. Starship’s target launch cost is $10 million. It carries 100–150 metric tons to LEO. At $10M divided by 100 tonnes, that’s $100/kg. At $2M per launch — possible at high cadence — it’s $20/kg. The fuel alone costs roughly $900,000. Once you’ve amortised the vehicle and infrastructure across enough flights, you approach the fuel cost floor.

The Number That Matters

The $100/kg threshold is not aspirational. It’s a specific price point at which the economics of an orbital economy become self-reinforcing. Below it, the businesses that couldn’t work at $2,720 unlock. Capital floods in. Infrastructure gets built. The orbital economy stops being a story about satellites and starts being a story about everything.

Starship is the most plausible path to crossing it. The IPO filing confirms payload delivery to orbit is expected in H2 2026. We’re tracking every test flight, every cost disclosure, every cadence milestone.

That’s exactly what The View from Space tracks.