An extracted archive of 3,391 orbital launches shows the US–Soviet duopoly giving way to a many-bloc launch map
Asked:
“Every orbital launch from 1957 to today — for each one list the year, the launch site, the operating bloc and whether the site is still active.”
This report covers 3,391 distinct orbital-launch records extracted live from Orbital Radar, spanning 1958–2026 across 48 launch-site labels and 69 years — 31 of those sites still launching in 2021–2026. Counts are launches per calendar year, grouped by an analytical “operating bloc”.
Partial live-web extraction. The source states its full database holds about 7,391 launches since 1957, but only 3,391 records were exposed in the pages available to this collection; the 1957 page was absent, and 66 of the 69 years cap at exactly 50 extracted rows. Treat every total here as extracted, not global — recent-era yearly totals in particular are truncated.
Launches per year by operating bloc, as extracted
Stacked launches per calendar year, 1958–2026 · extraction caps ~50 rows per year, so busy years are undercounted · hover a bar for exact values
Where the launches came from: top 20 sites by decade
Extracted launches per decade for the 20 busiest site labels · darker is more · ● still active (2021–2026 launch in archive), ○ dormant
The rows carry no coordinates, so no point map is drawn; this ranked site-by-decade grid is the honest substitute.
What the picture cannot say alone
Baikonur (792) and Plesetsk (742) alone account for 45% of all extracted launches, and both still fly today. orbitalradar.com
The Soviet Union is the single largest bloc with 1,057 extracted launches, ahead of the United States at 1,013; Russia / post-Soviet adds 544 more after 1991. orbitalradar.com
China (380), Europe (195), Japan (49), India (48) and Rocket Lab's New Zealand site (20) make the 2010s–2020s the most geographically varied era in the archive. orbitalradar.com
17 of the 48 site labels have no extracted launch since 2020 — including one-era sites like China Lake, whose six 1958 NOTS attempts all failed. orbitalradar.com
The launch records
Definitions. “Operating bloc” is an analytical classification inferred primarily from the launch site's controlling country or space program at launch time — Soviet sites are “Soviet Union” before 1992 and “Russia / post-Soviet” thereafter; unresolved edge cases fall back to the named operator. “Still active” is a reproducible proxy, not an official facility-status claim: Yes means the site label has at least one extracted orbital launch during 2021–2026; No means its last extracted launch is before 2021.
Year
Launch site
Bloc
Active
Date
Mission
Vehicle
Operator
Outcome
Source
Method: partial live-web extraction from Orbital Radar (built on GCAT and Launch Library 2), read 2026-09-01. One row per extracted orbital launch: 3,391 rows, 1958–2026, 48 site labels, 69 years; the source claims ~7,391 launches since 1957 and the 1957 page was not indexed, so all figures are extracted counts, not global totals. A number counts launches per calendar year or per site label. The table lists the first 300 matching rows per filter for space; filters search the full 3,391.