Launch tempo collapsed after the Cold War, then tripled in a decade: 6,669 orbital launch attempts, 1957–2026

Asked (summary):

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.

The assembled launch-level file holds 6,669 orbital and deep-space launch attempts — successes and confirmed failures, including pad losses and aborts counted by the source — across 67 of the 70 calendar years from 1957 through 2026 (the 2021, 2023 and 2025 yearly pages yielded no records during extraction). “Operating bloc” means the country, polity or multinational organization operating the launch service, not payload ownership or merely the hosting territory; “launch site” is site-level, not pad-level. The peak captured year is 2024 with 258 attempts.

Coverage note. 6,669 attempts over 67/70 years. Site activity is resolved as “Yes” for 3,660 rows and unresolved for 3,009 rows — unresolved never means “No”. Operating bloc is likewise blank (unresolved) on 3,129 rows, concentrated in later years. A “Yes” rests either on a GCAT operational-lifespan record or on a recorded orbital launch from that site in 2025–2026, as stated per row in the activity basis. Latitude/longitude are present on only 13 of 6,669 rows, so no map is drawn; coordinates are incomplete.

Launch attempts per year, stacked by operating bloc

Hover a bar segment for the year’s breakdown. Filters below apply to the chart and the table together.

Bloc Site Outcome Site activity Year from Year to Search

The Soviet Union alone operated 1,938 of the 6,669 attempts, and its workhorse site NIIP-53 (Plesetsk) hosted 1,383 launches — more than any other site in the file. keeptrack.space

Annual tempo fell from Cold-War peaks above 120 to a trough in the 2000s, then tripled: the captured record peaks at 258 attempts in 2024. keeptrack.space

475 of the 6,669 attempts are recorded failures; the early years are failure-heavy — most 1958 US attempts from Cape Canaveral and NOTS failed. keeptrack.space

Site activity is verified “Yes” for 3,660 rows, via GCAT operational-lifespan records or recorded 2025–2026 orbital launches; the remaining 3,009 rows stay unresolved by design. planet4589.org

All launch attempts

Sorted and filtered with the controls above. Click a header to sort.

Launch-level file assembled from yearly KeepTrack chronologies drawn from Jonathan McDowell’s GCAT (updated 2026-10-17; requested cutoff 2026-10-21), GCAT’s launch methodology/completeness page, and a GCAT site-status mirror at newspaceeconomy.ca. 6,669 rows, one per orbital or deep-space launch attempt, covering 67 of 70 calendar years 1957–2026; counts include successes and confirmed failed attempts. Three source hosts; the largest single URL backs about 3.9% of rows. Coordinates present on 13 rows only, so no map is shown. Site-activity and operating-bloc blanks are left unresolved, never coerced to “No”.

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