Two Soviet launch sites out-launched all of America

Every orbital launch on Earth from Sputnik to today — 7,117 flights from 43 launch sites across 70 unbroken years, one frame per year. Plesetsk and Baikonur flew 3,227 between them, against 2,240 from every American site combined. Press play and watch the centre of gravity move: Baikonur, then Plesetsk, then Cape Canaveral and Vandenberg, then China, then a cadence nobody has matched.

What the 70 years show

1. The busiest launch site on Earth is in a Russian forest. Plesetsk, in Arkhangelsk oblast, flew 1,687 orbital launches — nearly a quarter of every launch in history, ahead of Baikonur's 1,540, Cape Canaveral's 1,102 and Vandenberg's 903. It peaked at 70 in 1977, a single-year record for one site that still stands.

2. Almost half of spaceflight is Soviet. 3,364 launches of 7,117 left Soviet or Russian soil — 47% — against 2,240 American, 774 Chinese, 405 from everyone else and 334 European. Through most of the Cold War the USSR launched roughly twice as often as the United States, every single year.

3. 1991 broke the pattern. Plesetsk fell from 50 launches in 1990 to 38 in 1991, and never recovered — down to 7 by 1998, from 70 at its peak. The world total fell with it, from 114 in 1990 to 65 in 1996, and did not pass its Cold War level again until 2018.

4. The record is not in the past, and it is not only American. 2025 saw 329 orbital launches, more than 1967 and 1977 — the two busiest years of the space race — put together. China has flown 774 launches all told, but 570 of them came after 2015: three quarters of its entire history in the last eleven years.

Every site that reached orbit

Keenable