The Soviet Union launched more rockets than everyone else combined

Every orbital launch on Earth from Sputnik to today — 6,182 flights from 38 launch sites over 70 years, one frame per year. 3,269 of them left Soviet or Russian soil, against 1,824 American. Press play and watch the centre of gravity move: Baikonur, then Plesetsk, then Cape Canaveral and Vandenberg, then China, then a single Texas pad.

What the 70 years show

1. The busiest launch site on Earth is in a Russian forest. Plesetsk, in Arkhangelsk oblast, flew 1,650 orbital launches — ahead of Baikonur's 1,496, Cape Canaveral's 899 and Vandenberg's 802. It peaked at 70 launches in 1977, a single-site record for one year that still stands. Together the two Soviet sites flew 3,146, more than every American site combined at 1,824.

2. The Soviet Union out-launched the world. 3,269 launches from Soviet and Russian pads against 1,824 American, 480 Chinese, 307 European and 302 from everyone else. For most of the Cold War the USSR launched roughly twice as often as the United States, every year.

3. 1991 broke the pattern. Plesetsk fell from 50 launches in 1990 to 38 in 1991 and 33 in 1992, and never recovered — down to 7 by 1998, from 70 at its peak. The world total fell with it, from 128 in 1990 to 65 in 1996.

4. The record is not in the past. 2025 saw 326 orbital launches — more than 1967 and 1977, the two busiest years of the space race, put together. Cape Canaveral and Vandenberg accounted for 253 of the 520 launches across 2025 and 2026, just under half of everything on the planet.

Every site that reached orbit

Keenable