The Quick Answer
Kalshi's 2026 SpaceX launch-count board prices the year landing in the 150s. Above 150 is quoted 81–92c, and then the ladder falls off a cliff: Above 160 is quoted in the mid-30s (its last print was 31c, a gap I come back to), Above 170 near 10c, and everything past 180 is single digits. Read as a distribution, that is roughly a coin-flip-plus that the year ends somewhere between 151 and 160, with the 160s the next most likely landing zone. The board is a ladder of "more than N" contracts settling against SpaceX's own published launch list and FAA commercial space data. The full ladder strike by strike, why the count market behaves nothing like a yes/no, and my call on that 160 rung, are all below.
There is one rung on this board where the price falls through the floor, and that cliff is the entire article. Everywhere else the ladder steps down politely, a few cents at a time, the way a well-behaved probability distribution should. Between 150 and 160 it drops something like fifty points, call it forty-five to sixty depending which side of those quotes you take. Hold onto that gap; it explains what the crowd actually believes, it explains why this market feels so different from betting on a single event, and it is where I am going to plant my own flag by the end of the page.
Prices below are from Kalshi, August 14, 2026. Contracts and their prices move; the mechanics do not.
The 2026 Ladder, Strike By Strike
The annual event is KXSPACEXCOUNT-26B, a stack of nine "more than N" contracts asking about the 2026 calendar year, all closing together on January 1, 2027. Each one settles to $1 or $0 on its own terms, and you can take either side of any rung.
| Contract | Yes bid–ask | Last traded | Volume |
|---|---|---|---|
| Above 120 | 97–99c | 97c | 33,000 |
| Above 140 | 91–95c | 91c | 56,800 |
| Above 150 | 81–92c | 85c | 8,300 |
| Above 160 | 33–35c | 31c | 155,400 |
| Above 170 | 9–11c | 10c | 77,600 |
| Above 180 | 7–9c | 9c | 112,200 |
| Above 190 | 6–7c | 6c | 39,600 |
| Above 200 | 3–6c | 3c | 28,500 |
| Above 210 | 3–4c | 4c | 44,300 |
The row that matters is Above 160, and not only because of the price. It is the busiest contract on the board, running about 1.4 times the next-busiest rung and nearly nineteen times the Above 150 line directly above it. That is where the argument is happening, and the quotes say the same thing: Above 160 is two cents wide, tight enough that market makers are comfortable standing on both sides of it.
Above 150 is the odd rung out, and it is worth pausing on. It is the thinnest contract on the board, and its quote is eleven cents wide. That is not because everyone agrees with it — Above 120 sits at 97c, far more settled, and traded four times the volume. It is because Above 150 is the one rung whose written terms are ambiguous, as the settlement section below gets into. A contract nobody can price confidently against its own wording is a contract makers quote wide and thin. Its 85c is a stale last print behind that spread, which is exactly the sort of number this page will later tell you not to trust.
Subtract adjacent rungs and the ladder becomes a distribution. The 151-to-160 band alone takes roughly fifty points. The 161-to-170 band takes about another twenty-four. Past that, the whole rest of the number line, every outcome from 171 launches to infinity, splits about ten points between it. One useful reflex here: a contract's price is not exactly a probability, and subtracting quotes on a nine-rung ladder compounds whatever gap exists. Treat those band numbers as the shape of the crowd's belief, not as decimals to carry forward.
The Columnist's Call
I think they clear 160.
That is my read, not a claim about the board. The market has looked at this all year and settled on the 150s, and the crowd doing that has more money on the line than I do. But the gap between where the ladder puts its center and where the 160 rung sits is not a chasm in launch terms. It is a handful of vehicles. On a program flying Starlink stacks as its metronome, a handful of vehicles is one good month, or one month where the pads and the range both cooperate.
The concrete version of my case is sitting on the other board in this same series, and running the subtraction between the two is the most useful thing on this page. The monthly market's central answer is fourteen launches in a month. The annual market's central answer is the 150s. Put those side by side with the calendar and they tell you something neither says alone: for a year with roughly four and a half months left to run at fourteen a month to still land in the 150s, the months already banked have to have gone at something closer to twelve or thirteen. The annual board is not disagreeing with the monthly board. It is averaging a slower first three quarters against a faster fourth.
Which means I have to be honest about what my lean actually requires. Fourteen a month holding is not my case — fourteen a month holding gets you the crowd's answer. Clearing 161 from that same starting point needs the back end of the year to run above fifteen. So my call is not that the current rate persists. It is that the rate keeps climbing.
I make that bet because this cadence has behaved like a ratchet rather than a cycle. Capacity gets added and stays added. Pads come online, turnaround times compress, and the floor under the monthly rate tends to rise rather than revert. A count market rewards the boring middle of that trend far more than it rewards any single spectacular flight, and the back half of a year is where an accumulating capacity advantage shows up.
One boundary on all of it: this page does not print a running launch total, deliberately. The tally that settles these contracts is whatever SpaceX and the FAA publish, the two published counts do not always agree, and a number I typed from memory would be the least trustworthy thing here. The month-by-month reasoning above is a framework built from the two boards, not a proved count — check the settlement sources for the count itself.
The honest case against me is the tail risk that no monthly average captures. An anomaly triggers a mishap investigation, and a stand-down measured in weeks costs a chunk of the year's count in one stroke. Range availability, weather, and customer payload readiness all push right, never left. That asymmetry is why the crowd's 150s answer is defensible and why I would not confuse a lean with a certainty. I am also not going to tell you a single launch date, because dates in this business slip constantly and a schedule I got wrong would be worth less than nothing to you.
And to be plain about where this sits: it is a columnist's read, not a trade to copy. Stokastic trades prediction markets and holds positions in them, and we do not publish our live orders on any market, this one included — a resting order printed before it fills is an invitation for someone to step in front of it. Nothing above is a pick.
Why A Count Market Reprices Differently From A Yes/No
This is the most useful mechanic on the page, and it is the reason the cliff exists.
Most event contracts are a question waiting on a moment. Will this bill pass, will this film open above a number, will this team win. Information arrives in lumps, so the price moves in lumps, and the last lump is usually the whole answer.
A count market never gets that moment. It grinds toward its answer all year. Every launch is a tick up a staircase, and here is the part people underrate: the count can only go up. It never gives a step back. So "Above 160" is not really a question about SpaceX at all, it is a race between two clocks. The running total climbs one flight at a time. The calendar burns down continuously. The price is just the market's live opinion about which clock wins, and it re-rates on cadence rather than on headlines.
The one-line version: a yes/no market waits for news and then jumps. A count market has no news to wait for, so it drifts with the cadence and re-rates a fraction of a cent at a time, every day, in whichever direction the calendar is pushing.
That has three consequences worth internalizing before you go near one of these.
The price drifts even on days when nothing happens. A week with no launches is not neutral information, it is bad news for the Yes side, because a week of runway disappeared and the total did not move. Silence has a direction here, which is the opposite of how a yes/no behaves.
What one launch is worth depends entirely on which rung you are holding. This is the part most people get backwards, and the ladder above answers it precisely. On the far rungs, a single flight is worth a fraction of a cent: nothing about one launch changes whether the year clears 120 or falls short of 210. But on the rung the whole board is arguing about, it is worth real money. Fifty points of belief spread across a ten-launch band works out to something like five cents of Above 160 per individual flight. One launch, five cents. That is the one place on this ladder where a single event behaves like news, and it is not a coincidence that it is also the rung carrying nearly all the volume.
It converges early and quietly. Long before the close, the arithmetic hardens. Once the remaining months physically cannot supply the shortfall, the rung is decided even though the contract is still open and still quoted. That is very different from a yes/no, which can stay live right up to the instant it settles.
Now go back to that cliff. Fifty points packed into the 151-to-160 band is the crowd saying the cadence is already known to within about ten flights, and that the only question left is which side of a threshold the arithmetic lands on. That is also why five cents a launch is the right order of magnitude near the threshold: when the distribution is that concentrated, every flight is a meaningful slice of it.
What Actually Counts As A Launch
Settlement is where these contracts get lost or won on a technicality, so read the rung before you read the price.
"Above N" means more than N, not N or better. The contracts use a greater-than strike. Above 160 resolves Yes at 161 launches. A year that ends on exactly 160 pays the No side. On a board this tightly clustered, that off-by-one is not a footnote; it is the difference between the two most likely outcomes.
The sources are SpaceX and the FAA. Kalshi lists SpaceX's own launches page as the settlement source for the series, and the 2026 annual event names both the Federal Aviation Administration's commercial space data and SpaceX. That pairing matters, because published launch tallies disagree with each other. An FAA-licensed launch count, a company's own list, and a media tracker's running total can all be internally consistent and still differ by a few, depending on how each treats a launch that failed after liftoff, a licence held by a different operator, or a flight from a non-US range. When the board is decided by one or two flights, the source is not a detail.
A data delay does not void the market, it extends it. Most of the annual rungs carry an explicit clause: if FAA source-agency data is delayed, the market expires once the data updates, under Kalshi's own rulebook provision for exactly that case. Worth knowing before the last week of December, when a year-end tally and a holiday reporting calendar collide.
Read the rung, not the ladder, because the rule text is written per contract. Not every rung on this board carries identical wording. The Above 150 contract's rule text reads "more than 150 launches in Dec 2026" rather than naming the full year, and it does not carry the FAA-delay clause its neighbours do, even though it sits inside an event titled "How many launches will SpaceX have in 2026?" That is almost certainly boilerplate that got templated oddly rather than a different question, but "almost certainly" is not how you want to find out. Every one of these contracts settles on its own written terms, so pull up the rule text for the specific rung before you take a side on it. Our guide to how Kalshi's rules are written, changed, and enforced covers the general case, and disputed settlements covers what happens when the wording and the sources conflict.
The annual board closes January 1, 2027. Close time is not the same as the event ending, and on a count market the two are unusually far apart in feel: the answer is effectively fixed weeks before the contract stops quoting.
The Monthly Board Is The Same Question On A Shorter Clock
The series also runs a monthly event, and it is the cleanest way to see the mechanic in miniature. A fresh monthly event is listed every month, laddering in single launches rather than tens. The board below is the August 2026 event (KXSPACEXCOUNT-26AUG), closing September 1, priced the same day as the annual table above.
| Contract | Yes bid–ask | Last traded | Contracts traded |
|---|---|---|---|
| Above 10 | 99c–$1.00 | 99c | 66,370 |
| Above 11 | 98–99c | 99c | 22,286 |
| Above 12 | 94–95c | 94c | 45,470 |
| Above 13 | 76–77c | 76c | 51,391 |
| Above 14 | 19–21c | 19c | 37,700 |
| Above 15 | 3–4c | 4c | 38,082 |
| Above 16 | 1–2c | 2c | 18,925 |
| Above 17 | 0–1c | 1c | 7,097 |
| Above 18 | 0–1c | 1c | 27,496 |
Above 13 at 76c and Above 14 at 19c means the market's single most likely month is exactly fourteen launches, carrying something like fifty-seven points of the distribution on its own. Everything above fifteen is priced as a rounding error. That fourteen is the number I leaned on earlier, and this is where it comes from: not a projection of mine, just the rung the monthly crowd has converged on.
Two things fall out of putting the two boards side by side. First, the monthly ladder is far more decisive than the annual one, because a month is short enough that the running total is already most of the answer, which is the convergence effect above showing up in the prices themselves. Second, the monthly series recurs, so the same question gets asked and answered twelve times a year while the annual rung waits. If you want a market where the grind is visible on a human timescale, the monthly board is the one to watch.
Where The Ladder Stops Behaving
A ladder should step down monotonically. Above 200 should never be cheaper than Above 210, because every year with more than 210 launches is also a year with more than 200, so the lower strike has to be worth at least as much. On the last-traded column, that ordering breaks: Above 200 last printed at 3c while Above 210 printed at 4c. Every other rung on the board steps down in the right direction.
That single inversion is not an opportunity, it is a symptom, and the live quotes show why. The live quotes narrow the problem rather than confirming it: Above 200 is quoted 3–6c against Above 210's 3–4c, so the two bids are simply tied at 3c and only the asks separate them in the correct direction. The clear inversion lives entirely in the last-traded column, because last-traded on a thin rung is stale by construction, a snapshot of whenever somebody last crossed the spread, and on a nine-rung ladder those snapshots were taken at nine different moments. Read the quote, not the print.
The quotes carry their own warning anyway. Bid to ask on the far tail runs one to three cents wide on contracts priced at three to nine cents, so the spread is a large fraction of the entire instrument. That is the definition of a market where liquidity, not the view, decides whether you can trade.
The practical version: an instant fill on a tail rung usually means you paid for it. In a market where the entire question is worth a few cents, crossing the spread can cost more than the opinion is worth, and reading a price quoted in cents alongside its spread is the habit that saves you from that.
The Risk Shape Nobody Reads Until It Is Too Late
Every one of those far-tail rungs is an invitation to sell a long shot. Above 210 at 3 or 4c reads as costless to someone who has already decided it cannot happen. It is the single most dangerous trade shape on this board.
Take the Above 180 rung, quoted 7–9c, as the illustration.
The arithmetic that decides everything else: selling an unlikely outcome collects a small premium and risks most of a dollar. Sell that rung at 8c and you keep 8c when you are right, but you are risking the other 92c when you are wrong. Roughly speaking, one loss erases the premiums from about 11 wins.
That ratio, not the hit rate, is what makes position sizing the whole game. It also means a red stretch that wipes out a green one is the shape of the trade working as designed, not a malfunction.
And the arithmetic gets worse, not better, the further out you sell. Out at Above 210, a 3-to-4c premium against the same near-dollar of downside needs something closer to twenty-five or thirty wins to absorb a single loss. The rungs that look most obviously impossible are the ones with the least margin for being wrong about them, which is the exact inversion of how they feel. Anyone who wants the long version should read what happens when you sell a long shot before they place one, not after.
And remember which clock you are on. On a count market, the tail you sold in January is exposed to eleven more months of a total that only climbs. There is no equivalent of a game ending early.
Where To Go From Here
The sharpest way to feel the difference is to put this board next to a date market on the same subject. The Artemis 3 moon landing timeline prices space as a schedule rather than a tally, and one slipped launch hits the two in opposite ways: a slip can gut a date rung outright, because the whole contract is the calendar, while on a count market it merely shaves the numerator and leaves the question standing. Same news, two entirely different price reactions. If event contracts are new to you, start with how prediction markets work and what else is listed on the exchange.
If you want to watch threshold ladders reprice on a daily clock rather than an annual one, our Kalshi weather markets guide tracks the same band-and-strike structure on contracts that settle every single day.
Elsewhere on OddsShopper, the free expert picks hub is open to anyone.
FAQ
How Many Launches Has SpaceX Done This Year?
There are two authoritative tallies and they do not always agree, which is the real answer to this question. SpaceX maintains its own launches list, and the FAA publishes commercial space launch data; Kalshi's 2026 annual event names both as settlement sources. They can differ over a vehicle that lifted off and then failed, a licence held by another operator, or a flight from a non-US range. This page does not print a running figure of its own, because a count typed from memory would be less reliable than either source and would go stale within days. Go to the two lists above, and note which one you are reading.
How Many Launches Will SpaceX Have In 2026?
The market's answer is the 150s. Above 150 is quoted 81-92c and Above 160 in the mid-30s, which puts roughly half the distribution in the 151-to-160 band and about another quarter in the 160s. Nobody knows the number, and the ladder is the crowd's live estimate rather than a forecast from any one source.
What Is The SpaceX Launch Schedule?
SpaceX publishes upcoming missions on its own site, and that is the only schedule worth treating as authoritative. Even then, launch dates slip routinely for weather, range conflicts, vehicle checkouts, and customer readiness. That unreliability is exactly why a count market exists: it prices the cadence over a whole month or year, where individual slips wash out, instead of asking you to be right about any one date.
Does A Failed Launch Count?
It depends on how the settlement sources record it, which is the reason to read the source list before the price. Different published tallies treat a vehicle that lifted off and then failed, a licence held by another operator, or a flight from a non-US range differently. On a board where one or two flights decide a rung, that definitional question is worth more attention than the price is.
How Much Does One Launch Move The Price?
It depends on the rung. On the far strikes almost nothing moves, because one flight does not change whether the year clears 120 or falls short of 210. Near the contested threshold it is a different story: with roughly fifty points of probability spread across the ten-launch band between 150 and 160, a single launch is worth something on the order of five cents to Above 160. The other half of the mechanic surprises people more — days with no launch also move the price, in the opposite direction, because runway disappeared and the total did not.
Kalshi contracts are CFTC-regulated event derivatives traded on a designated contract market, not sportsbook wagers, and they can lose their full value. 18+, available where Kalshi operates, with broad, state-specific availability under federal oversight. The risk of loss is real. Stokastic trades prediction markets and holds positions in them. We have no affiliate or commercial relationship with Kalshi; we do carry sign-up offers for some other prediction-market and betting platforms. Nothing on this page is a pick, a play, or trading advice.
