Snapchat daily active users

NASA Artemis program spending and Snapchat's daily active users have, between 2015 and 2023, risen together at a correlation of 0.974. A lunar program and an ephemeral-photo app, both staking out real estate in, respectively, cislunar space and the American teenager's phone. The two constituencies do not overlap much. The growth curves, improbably, do.

Artemis spending grew from around $2 billion in 2015 to nearly $9 billion by 2023 as the program moved through SLS and Orion development. Snapchat DAU grew from around 110 million in 2015 to over 400 million by 2023, driven by international growth, Stories, and AR Lenses. Both trends are products of the same decade's different expansions — one public-sector, highly engineered, decade-long; one private-sector, algorithmic, measured in weekly cohorts — and the comparison reveals only that the 2015-2023 window was kind to almost every counted thing.

Eight years of two lines rising together can describe a decade's government ambition and a teenager's daily app usage scaling together. The rocket and the snap are, in only that sense, contemporaries.