FAA-licensed commercial space launches

It turns out that the number of times Elon Musk felt compelled to share his thoughts with the internet has almost perfect synchronicity with how many people were permitted to launch rockets into space, which is either a remarkable validation of some theory about human attention and industrial capacity, or simply proof that we will correlate literally anything if given enough years and a spreadsheet. The universe does not care, but we certainly do.

What's genuinely interesting is that both metrics were probably rising together because the space industry boomed between 2015 and 2022, driven by reusable rocket technology, venture capital flooding into NewSpace, and an almost frenzied global interest in private spaceflight—the sort of thing that would naturally attract media attention from the sort of person who thinks in public. You could fit roughly 300 Elon Musk tweets per year into the space of a SpaceX Falcon 9 launch, and both numbers roughly quadrupled over this period, which tells you something about exponential enthusiasm meeting exponential infrastructure.

The real lesson here is not that Musk's Twitter activity drives FAA licensing decisions, nor the reverse, but rather that both are being pulled along by a third invisible thing—a particular moment in history when spaceflight stopped being mythical and started being commercial. We saw what we wanted to see in the data, which is to say we saw the pattern correctly but invented the causation, which is more or less how humans have always worked. The rockets went up. So did the tweets.