Who reaches orbit, and how that has shifted since 1957.
Orbital launches · per year · absolute · 2017–2026. The shaded band is 2026, still in progress. Megaconstellation filter applies to payload counts only.
Of the 27,435 satellites ever placed in orbit, 13,738 — 50% — belong to five broadband constellations begun since 2019. Counting payloads without separating them turns any comparison between nations into a Starlink chart.
Switch the chart to Payloads and tick Exclude megaconstellations to see it. The excluded set is a named list — Starlink, OneWeb, Kuiper, Qianfan, Guowang — rather than a size threshold, because a threshold quietly changes which constellations qualify from one year to the next and makes an older chart impossible to reproduce. It applies to payload counts only: launches and mass are undistorted, since a stack of sixty satellites is still one launch.
Every figure credits the nation that operated the launch.
| Nation | Attempts | Success | Mass (t) | Payloads | Excl. mega | Per launch |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Soviet Union | 2,392 | 92.8% | 8,760 | 3,262 | 3,262 | 1.5 |
| United States | 2,321 | 92.1% | 28,161 | 17,968 | 5,072 | 8.4 |
| Russia | 889 | 95.4% | 4,141 | 1,785 | 1,785 | 2.1 |
| China | 778 | 94.7% | 2,139 | 2,058 | 1,816 | 2.8 |
| Europe | 381 | 94.2% | 1,709 | 1,265 | 737 | 3.5 |
| Japan | 135 | 85.9% | 400 | 238 | 238 | 2.1 |
| India | 99 | 87.9% | 124 | 540 | 468 | 6.2 |
| New Zealand | 77 | 94.8% | 8 | 254 | 254 | 3.5 |
| Rest of world | 65 | 56.9% | 28 | 65 | 65 | 1.8 |
Success is the share of orbital attempts that reached orbit. Per launch is payloads divided by successful launches — the rideshare era shows up here more than anywhere else on the site. 418 catalogued payloads could not be traced to a successful orbital launch and are excluded from the payload columns.
Every orbital launch attempt since 1957, credited to the nation whose organisation operated it. Not the country the rocket lifted off from — a Soyuz from Baikonur is a Russian launch, not a Kazakh one — and not whoever owned the cargo.
That distinction matters most for Europe. Ariane carries a great deal of non-European cargo, and European operators fly a great deal on American rockets, so Europe's line here measures European launch activity, not European satellites.
This is the long view of the same launches counted on Launches and Mass to orbit. Those pages report the current year against recent history; this one reports the whole record by nation.
Counts here come from GCAT and so line up with /mass-to-orbit rather than with the Launch Library 2 figures on /launches — see When two metrics disagree.
Annual orbital launch activity since 1957, credited to the nation whose organisation operated each launch.
Jonathan McDowell’s GCAT — launch.tsv for the launches, satcat.tsv for the payloads they carried, and orgs.tsv to resolve each launch’s operating agency to a state.
Every orbital launch attempt, successful or not. Mass and payload counts are taken from successful launches only, since a failure delivers nothing.
Suborbital flights, missile tests and sounding rockets. Payload-debris fragments are excluded from payload counts.
A launch is credited to the nation where its operating organisation is registered — not the country it lifted off from, and not the owner of the cargo. A Soyuz from Baikonur is a Russian launch rather than a Kazakh one. Where a provider runs national subsidiaries, GCAT assigns them separate agency codes and they are counted separately: Rocket Lab’s flights from Māhia are New Zealand, its flights from Wallops are American.
Reported as two separate series and never merged. GCAT records them as distinct states, so the 1991 break comes from the source data rather than a cut-off date applied on top of it. Soviet-era launches are never reassigned to Russia.
Launches operated by ESA, its predecessor ELDO, and European national programmes. Arianespace is French-registered, so France carries most of the volume. Russia is excluded. This measures European launch activity, not European satellites — Ariane carries a great deal of non-European cargo, and European operators fly a great deal on American rockets.
Payload counts can optionally exclude Starlink, OneWeb, Kuiper, Qianfan and Guowang. This is a named, curated list rather than a size threshold: a threshold would silently change which constellations qualify from one year to the next and make an older chart impossible to reproduce. It applies to payload counts only — launches and mass are undistorted, because a stack of sixty satellites is still one launch. Roughly half of every satellite ever launched belongs to those five constellations, so a national comparison of payload counts is close to meaningless without it.
An optional three-year centred average is available on the per-year view only; it is meaningless on a running total, so it is disabled there. The current year is a partial year: it is shaded on every chart, excluded from every smoothing window, and can be removed entirely with a toggle. A running total always accumulates from 1957 even when the visible range starts later, so narrowing the range never restarts the count.
Attribution depends on GCAT’s agency-to-state mapping; a small number of launches carry an agency code with no state recorded and fall into “rest of world”. A few catalogued payloads cannot be traced back to a successful orbital launch and are excluded from payload counts. Multinational launches are credited to the primary operating agency only. GCAT is hand-maintained, so the most recent weeks can lag.
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