53 launches recovered against a 7,412-launch record: this extraction answers 0.7% of the question
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.”
A live archive located during research reports 7,412 orbital launch attempts from 1957 through 2026 (updated 2026-09-20). The structured cross-source extraction in this run recovered only 53 unique launch rows — about 0.7% of that universe — spanning 9 years between 1986 and 2025, from 6 source hosts. This page is a coverage audit of a partial sample, not the complete archive the question asks for.
Partial result — 53 of 7,412 launches (≈0.7%)
What was recovered, year by year
Partial extracted sample only — this is not global launch activity. Each cell is a year, 1957–2026; shaded cells hold extracted rows (count printed). Grey cells are years where the record holds launches but this extraction recovered none.
The 53 extracted rows cluster in just 9 of the 70 years since 1957; 2021–2022 alone supply 29 rows, mostly from translated Wikipedia launch lists. en-wikipedia-org.translate.goog
Only 3 of 53 rows carry a provisional “site still active” flag, because the flag is inferred solely from whether the same normalized site name appears in a 2025 or 2026 extracted row — a conservative artifact of thin coverage, not a real survey of site status. translate.google.com
No single source dominates: the largest host contributed 29 of 53 rows and the largest single URL 15, with NASA history PDFs supplying the 1986–2001 rows. nasa.gov
The complete answer exists and is downloadable: GCAT's machine-readable launch log carries year, site, operating bloc and a site-active field for every attempt since Sputnik. planet4589.org
How to complete the archive
Dataset discovery surfaced direct, machine-readable sources that together cover the full launch record. Orbital Radar states 7,412-launch coverage; Launch Library 2 offers an open API at roughly 7,988–8,005 records, though that total includes future and non-orbital entries and was not filtered in this run.
Methodology and limitations
This table is not the answer. It holds 53 of a stated 7,412 orbital launch attempts (≈0.7%); every other launch is missing from it.
Site-active flag is provisional. A site counts as active only if its normalized name appears in a 2025 or 2026 extracted launch. With one 2025 row in the sample, almost everything is flagged inactive — including sites known to launch today. Treat it as a lower bound, never as a site-status verdict.
Site names are not normalized across sources. The same launch can appear as “Kazakhstan” and “the desert of Kazakhstan”; duplicates from different hosts were kept when fields differ.
Nulls preserved. Some rows lack an outcome or an operating bloc; they are shown as “—” rather than dropped.
Six hosts, no majority URL. Sources span six hosts and no single URL supports more than half the 53 rows.
The 53 extracted launch rows
Date
Year
Mission
Launch site
Bloc / operator
Outcome
Site active*
Source
*Provisional: inferred only from whether the site name recurs in a 2025–2026 extracted row.
Method: coverage audit of a cross-source extraction run, 2026. 53 unique orbital-launch rows (one per extracted launch: date, site, bloc, outcome, provisional site-active flag, source URL) from 6 hosts, set against the 7,412 attempts (1957–2026) reported by a live GCAT-enriched archive updated 2026-09-20. The active flag counts a site active only if it recurs in a 2025–2026 extracted row. A 336-row dataset-discovery table was condensed to the 5 most direct comprehensive sources; its rows are sources, not launches.