SpaceX launches per year

A sentence to be filed under "things nobody expected to write about 2020": Americans bought more pet food in proportion to how often SpaceX launched rockets. Neither fact seems to have been directly responsible for the other, though one cannot rule out catnip. The rockets, for the record, were empty.

SpaceX's launch cadence jumped dramatically starting in 2020 as Starlink deployments began in earnest, while pet food sales surged on pandemic pet adoption and housebound spending. The two trends intersected in the same year for entirely unrelated reasons: one was the scheduled beginning of a mega-constellation; the other was an emotional response to lockdown. One reached orbit. The other reached the pantry.

So the correlation is the accidental pairing of a private space program and a personal comfort habit. Both accelerated in the same year. Only one of them could be called historic.