The costs of space launch have fallen 96% in the past six decades and have the potential to plummet by nearly as much by 2040, a new study finds.
However, such an improvement might get hampered by a number of challenges, such as the rise of space debris in orbit or a single company monopolizing commercial space launch, researchers added.
Although previous analyses of space launch suggested that costs had dropped over time, one major problem with these prior studies was that they "considered the cost of the rockets, but not how much they launched during their lifetimes," study co-author Francesco Nicoli, an associate professor of political economy at the Politecnico University of Turin in Italy, told Space.com. This meant this earlier work failed to accurately track the average costs of reaching space.
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