For sixty years spaceflight was the business of states; only national budgets could carry its cost and risk. The Crew Dragon capsule launched on a Falcon 9 on 30 May 2020 ended that monopoly. The vehicle belonged to SpaceX; NASA was the customer buying a service. This followed the model NASA adopted through the 2010s: rather than developing the vehicle itself, purchasing flights at a fixed price.

The technical change that lowered the cost was the first stage returning to land vertically for reuse. First achieved in 2015, the manoeuvre had become routine by the 2020s, and the cost of putting a kilogram into orbit fell sharply against the Space Shuttle era. The result was a jump in flight rate — more than two hundred orbital launches worldwide in 2024, most of them by a single company.

That concentration raises new questions. Satellite constellations have filled low Earth orbit with tens of thousands of objects, increasing collision risk and interference with astronomy. Space law still rests on the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, which is largely silent on commercial mining and traffic management. Space becoming accessible is a historical threshold; who reaches it, and under whose rules, remains unanswered.