COST TO LAUNCH TO LOW EARTH ORBIT 1961-2023.

• Author: Mangu-Ward, Katherine

Getting off-planet is finally getting cheap. For decades, the only way to reach low Earth orbit (LEO) was on a wildly expensive, overbooked, and unreliable government rocket. But since independent companies have moved into the sector, improvements in technology and business models have driven down per-kilogram launch costs to a tiny fraction of what they were in the heyday of Apollo. Sending an ant farm to space on SpaceX's Falcon Heavy, for example, costs a hair over 2 percent of the price to send the same science project up with the space shuttle program. Private space companies have also democratized space access beyond a tiny handful of government-selected projects and people, and in so doing paved the way for innovation.

The calculus about whether to experiment with new technology, whether to build redundancy, and a host of...