Launchonomics

The Starbench Launchonomics Model prices the global launch market. Effective $/kg to orbit is computed per vehicle family and quarter from disclosed values: FPDS and NSSL awards, NASA task orders, published list prices, and SEC-filed contracts. Each price row is tagged with where it came from, and flights with no public price (e.g., Starlink's internal missions) are reported as unpriced rather than estimated.

What's inside

• Launch universe: GCAT and Launch Library records cross-checked and deduplicated to one row per orbital attempt, under canonical vehicle-family names
• Pricing: a strict hierarchy per launch: disclosed contract, IDIQ allocation, the dated list-price curve, then an escalated analog; no contract is counted twice
• Customer mix: civil/defense/commercial classification from payload-owner identity, validated against a hand-audited Falcon 9 sample
• Learning curves: Wright's-law fits with bootstrap confidence intervals, per family and per Falcon 9/Starship block
• Marginal cost: bottoms-up cost models for Falcon 9, Starship (reuse-depth fan), Electron, Neutron, Vulcan, New Glenn, and others
• Forward manifest: eight quarters out, reconciled across five sources, tiered contracted/announced/rumored
• Calibration: launch counts reconcile against SpaceX's audited S-1 disclosures; modeled upmass lands within 3% of the audited total

What subscribers receive

• The flagship quarterly report: 18 charts, each with a resolved source footnote
• A weekly "what changed" diff on contracts and the manifest
• CSV/parquet exports with a self-contained provenance manifest