FAA-licensed commercial space launches

It appears that the universe has decided that the number of humans permitted to launch rockets into space is directly proportional to how many people want to watch a twenty-something man give away money on the internet, which is either a profound commentary on modern civilization or evidence that correlation software has finally achieved sentience and is now pranking us. Between 2016 and 2022, as MrBeast accumulated subscribers with the determination of someone collecting bottle caps, the FAA quietly licensed more and more people to hurl themselves toward the thermosphere. One wonders what Kepler would have made of this.

The real culprit here is almost certainly that both phenomena are riding the same wave of exponential internet adoption and economic growth in the developed world. The years 2016-2022 saw broadband speeds improve by roughly the same factor that commercial space ambitions accelerated—which is to say, dramatically—while venture capital and disposable income both swelled like a rising tide that lifted even the silliest boats. MrBeast's subscriber count (roughly 200 million by 2022) and the handful of licensed commercial spaceports probably both benefited from the same underlying cultural shift: a society rich enough to be simultaneously bored and ambitious, with the broadband infrastructure to prove it. When you can stream a video of someone buying an island and also watch a rocket land itself, you're living in an age of surplus, and surplus breeds both entertainment moguls and people who think launching a satellite sounds fun.

This is what pattern-seeking animals do when they're given access to the entire internet and six years of data—they find the correlation, fall in love with it, and briefly convince themselves it means something. Of course, if you plotted the rise of olive oil imports against astronaut training programs over the same period, you'd probably get r=0.96 as well. We are, it seems, simply living in an age when almost everything correlates with almost everything else. The real question is why we keep asking.