Snapchat daily active usersObjects launched into Earth orbit per year
Objects launched into Earth orbit per year and Snapchat's daily active users have, between 2015 and 2023, risen together at a correlation of 0.977. Satellites arriving in low Earth orbit and teenagers arriving on a messaging app with disappearing pictures, climbing the same slope. The sky got more crowded. So did the phone.
Annual orbital launches grew from around 90 in 2015 to over 180 by 2023, driven by SpaceX's reusable Falcon 9, the Starlink buildout, and a rideshare model that lowered the entry bar for small-satellite operators. Snapchat daily active users grew from around 110 million in 2015 to over 400 million by 2023, driven by international expansion, Stories, AR lenses, and a format every subsequent social platform quietly copied. Both trends belong to the same decade of newly cheap distribution — one into orbit, one into a teenager's feed — and both curves would have been dismissed as fanciful in 2014.
Eight years of two lines rising together can describe a decade's two kinds of density: satellites above, messages below. Both kinds of populations are larger now than anyone planned for.
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