Half of every launch on Earth was one rocket, from two pads

Every orbital launch worldwide from 1 January 2025 to 19 August 2026 — 530 flights from 28 spaceports, each with its real date, pad, vehicle and destination. Falcon 9 flew 262 of them, 49% of every launch on the planet, and 235 lifted off from two pieces of concrete: Cape Canaveral SLC-40 and Vandenberg SLC-4E.

What the map shows

1. Two pads carry the world. Cape Canaveral SLC-40 flew 118 times and Vandenberg SLC-4E flew 117 — 235 of 530 launches, 44%, from two pieces of concrete about 3,600 km apart. Add Kennedy LC-39A and the three-pad total reaches 263, more than half of everything that reached orbit.

2. The United States and China are the whole picture. 294 launches lifted off from American soil and 150 from Chinese, together 84% of the total. The remaining 86 are spread across 13 countries, and 27 of those are one company at one New Zealand pad.

3. Failure clusters where the new vehicles fly. 21 launches failed, a 4.0% rate. Jiuquan alone accounts for 5 of them — it is the pad China's commercial startups use, and Ceres, Zhuque, Kuaizhou and Tianlong all failed there. No pad flying an established vehicle failed more than once.

4. Almost nothing leaves Earth orbit. 6 launches of 530 went further than a geostationary transfer: two lunar landers, Tianwen-2 to an asteroid, IMAP to the Sun-Earth L1 point, ESCAPADE to Mars, and Artemis II around the Moon. 453 of 530, 85%, stopped in low Earth orbit — and most of those were carrying communications constellations.

Every spaceport that flew

Keenable