The helium rally that blamed the rockets
Showing the misleading chart
Give orbital launches and the helium price a y-axis each, tune the two ranges by hand, and the lines cross and converge — helium becomes the trade on the space race, r = 0.96. Put both on one ruler and launches are up 218% while helium managed 57%, on a schedule set by fires and plant outages, not flight manifests.
01The claim
Every rocket that goes up takes the helium price with it — launch cadence and helium have moved as one since 2019 (r = 0.96), and the lines crossed in 2022. With launch records falling every year, helium is the trade on the space race.
02The trick
Both series are real and both went up, which is all a dual-axis chart needs. The left axis (launches per year) runs 60 to 280; the right (Grade-A helium, dollars per thousand cubic feet) runs $190 to $410 — two free knobs turned until three flat years of helium read as a “coil”, the 2022–23 supply spike “snaps into line”, and the lines cross dramatically on the way. The crossing is pure typography: launches-per-year and dollars-per-Mcf share no unit, so the lines intersect wherever the axis ranges put them — stretch either scale and the fateful cross slides to any year you like. The r = 0.96 badge is honest arithmetic doing dishonest work, since almost any two series that both trended upward for six years correlate about that well. Even the mechanism the chart leans on is real but small: rockets do fly on helium-pressurized tanks, but aerospace, pressurizing and purging together take roughly 7–9% of US helium use in the USGS accounting — lifting gas, the category with the party balloons in it, buys more. (This exhibit is our own demonstration in the house style of a commodities-desk note, drawn from the USGS price series and public launch counts, not from any real desk’s research.)
03The fix
Deny the chart its second axis and the lockstep dissolves. Indexed to 100 at 2019, launches finish 2025 up 218% and helium up 57% — and the shapes disagree everywhere it matters. Helium sat flat at $210 for three straight years while launches climbed 42%; a price that ignores its supposed cause for three years is not obeying it. When the price did jump, in 2022–23, the timing matches the supply ledger, not the launch manifest: a fire idled Russia’s giant new Amur plant (its first train restarted only in September 2023), the enrichment unit at the US Cliffside reserve sat broken from mid-January to late June 2022, and Qatari plants shut down — all documented in USGS’s own yearly summaries. Then 2025 ran the experiment the deck never wanted: a record 324 launches, and the price fell 15% to $330 as six new US operations, a Texas storage cavern, and new plants in Canada and South Africa came online. The tell is two different units sharing one drama — a crossing, a convergence, a “snap into line”. Ask what the crossing means in units (nothing), and how big the claimed causal channel is (under a tenth of demand). A real relationship survives being drawn on one ruler; this one didn’t.