SpaceX launches per year

As SpaceX has launched more rockets per year, alcohol-impaired driving fatalities in the US have risen, a correlation that connects humanity's greatest engineering achievement to humanity's most persistent self-destructive habit with the statistical elegance of a scatter plot that cannot distinguish between reaching for the stars and reaching for the car keys. The coefficient is 0.870 across eight years, which is barely enough to fill a manifest but more than enough to fill a chart.

SpaceX launches grew from about 8 per year in 2015 to over 60 by 2022, driven by Starlink deployments and commercial missions. Impaired driving fatalities grew from about 10,200 to over 13,300, reversing years of decline as pandemic-era drinking habits (alcohol consumption rose roughly 25 percent during lockdowns) combined with emptier roads that encouraged faster driving. Both trends accelerated after 2020: SpaceX's cadence increased with Starlink demand, and drunk driving surged as pandemic behaviors persisted. The shared accelerant is the 2020s economy—the same venture capital optimism funding rocket launches also funded the tech economy that enabled remote work, which enabled lunchtime drinking, which enabled impaired driving. The connection is economic, not orbital.

Eight years of rockets and drunk driving is a correlation that captures the contradictions of the 2020s: a species that can launch 60 rockets a year but cannot stop its members from drinking and driving. The rockets go up, the fatalities go up, and the shared variable is a decade that enabled both ambition and self-destruction with equal efficiency. The countdown completes. The blood alcohol does not.