FAA-licensed commercial space launches

It appears that somewhere in the vast bureaucratic machinery of human ambition, the more licenses the Federal Aviation Administration hands out for commercial space launches, the more people fall for emails claiming their bank account is being used by a Nigerian prince. One might have expected these two phenomena to exist in entirely separate universes, possibly different universes that don't even know the other's address. And yet, from 2005 to 2022, they moved together with the devotion of a pair of ballroom dancers who have never met.

The real culprit is almost certainly the internet itself, which was busy becoming the essential infrastructure of everything during this period. As more people went online—more businesses, more governments, more grandmothers learning to check their email—both legitimate space entrepreneurship and phishing campaigns found themselves in a target-rich environment. Consider that global internet users grew from roughly 1 billion in 2005 to nearly 5 billion by 2022; it's the kind of expansion that lifts all boats, including the ones crewed by people with genuinely innovative ideas about orbital mechanics and the ones captained by people who just want your login credentials. Both industries also benefited from improved digital infrastructure and lower barriers to entry—SpaceX made rockets cheaper, and cybercriminals made bulk email campaigns trivially easy. The economic cycle probably helped too; periods of growth meant more venture capital flowing to space companies and more people with actual money to fleece.

So we're left with the peculiar discovery that the same underlying forces reshaping civilization—connectivity, economic optimism, and humanity's infinite capacity for both wonder and gullibility—can make a pair of seemingly unrelated statistics dance in perfect synchronization. The space launches represent our better angels; the phishing attacks represent something considerably less noble. Yet there they are, moving together like conjoined twins separated by every conceivable measure of meaning, except apparently the ones that matter. We are creatures who find patterns. Most of them mean nothing.