Payload only: the satellites, crew capsules and cargo a rocket carries. The rocket itself, its propellant and its spent upper stage are not counted.
Includes 3 Starship (SpaceX) test flights at 120 t each: GCAT books the Ship itself as the payload, as it did the Shuttle orbiter. Cargo only: 2,098 t.
How much payload has reached orbit so far this year, measured in tonnes. Payload means the satellites and cargo rockets carry, not the rockets themselves.
Mass to orbit by launch provider (the company or agency that flew the rocket).
Mass to orbit by launch vehicle type.
Development flights of a vehicle still in its test programme (today: Starship). GCAT books the vehicle itself as the payload, the same convention it applied to the Shuttle orbiter and the X-37B, and the default view follows GCAT. The cargo-only view excludes the vehicle and counts only what each flight deployed, at the catalogued mass once GCAT lists it.
“Mass” here means payload mass: the satellites and cargo a rocket carries, not the rocket itself. A Starlink stack, a crew capsule, a science probe: their weight adds up on this page; the rocket's own structure, propellant, and spent upper stages do not.
It's the total payload mass delivered to orbit by successful launches since January 1, measured in tonnes (t). Figures come from Jonathan McDowell's GCAT, which records a payload mass for each launch; failed and suborbital flights are excluded.
Mass to orbit and Launches YTD look related but answer different questions. One weighs each launch by payload mass, the other counts launches equally. A single heavy lift can swing this page's number without moving the launch count at all.
See When two metrics disagree on the methodology page for the full reconciliation.
Sum of payload mass on successful orbital launches since January 1 of the current year.
Payload mass only. GCAT's OrbPay column is defined as “payload in tonnes delivered to orbit (perigee above 80 km)”, and that is the number reported here. It counts everything the rocket was carrying as cargo: satellites, crew capsules and cargo freighters bound for the space station, because all of them are payload. A launch GCAT codes as deep-space (LaunchCode DS: the payload left Earth orbit, such as Artemis or the Roman Space Telescope) is not mass to orbit and is excluded from every total here; the homepage’s Recently launched feed still lists it, flagged “beyond Earth orbit”. It does NOT include the rocket: the upper stage that did the final burn, and any propellant left in it, are excluded. GCAT tracks that separately as OrbMass (total mass in orbit at insertion cutoff, including the insertion stage and remaining propellant), and this metric deliberately does not use it. So “tonnes to orbit” here means tonnes of useful cargo, not tonnes of hardware in space.
Jonathan McDowell’s GCAT (launch.tsv)
GCAT also lists every object in orbit with its own mass, and summing those per launch looks like the cleaner definition. I checked it on 2026-10-24 across the 553 orbital launches of 2025–2026: 307 agree with the launch-level figure within 10%, 86 are off by more than 30%, and 88 have no catalogued payload objects at all. The misses are systematic, not noise: the per-object mass is a spacecraft’s dry or standard mass, so cargo ships and crew capsules come out at roughly half of what actually flew (Dragon CRS 10 t vs 17.9 t, Tianzhou 6.7 t vs 19 t, Shenzhou 3.3 t vs 9.9 t), and classified launches are undercounted. Starship’s flights have no catalogued payload objects, so the approach cannot settle the test-flight question either. The launch-level OrbPay figure stays.
Launches GCAT codes as orbital successes (LaunchCode OS, including its graded partial successes such as OS65: the payload reached orbit, not the intended one) with a recorded payload mass
Failed launches, suborbital flights, missile/sounding rockets and deep-space missions. Development test flights are included by default at GCAT’s figure; the cargo-only toggle on the page excludes them (see Test campaigns below).
Two conventions exist for development test flights of a vehicle still in its test programme (today: SpaceX Starship), and the page shows both. The default follows GCAT: it books the vehicle itself as the launch’s payload, a flat 120 t per Starship flight, exactly as it counted the Shuttle orbiter (about 115 t per flight, 1981–2011) and the X-37B spaceplane. I use GCAT’s data, so the headline uses GCAT’s definition, and it matches the figures quoted in press reports built on GCAT. A toggle on /mass-to-orbit switches to a cargo-only view, which excludes the vehicle and counts only what each test flight actually deployed, at the catalogued mass from GCAT’s satellite table once GCAT lists it: Starship Flight 14 carried 26 Starlink satellites, 52 t; Flights 12 and 13 deployed nothing. The view is recorded in the page URL so a screenshot can be reproduced. Every other surface that shows mass uses the default. Test flights count on /launches as launches either way, and are flagged in the Recently launched feed. Added 2026-10-24.
GCAT is maintained by hand and typically lags 1–2 weeks on the most recent launches. Some launches list partial-payload mass. GCAT codes a launch as deep-space (D) when its highest-energy object left Earth orbit, which also catches a few Earth-orbit payloads under an escaping upper stage (Landsat 8, WorldView-3 and -4, DMSP F19, roughly 2 t each); those are excluded here, an effect under 0.2% in any year. GCAT also cautions that recent OrbPay values are autogenerated and may not handle special cases correctly, so the most recent months can shift as entries are reviewed by hand.
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