Orbital Launches Since 1957 — Live Data Report

Eight verified launches sketch the arc from Soviet cosmodromes to commercial Florida — a spot check, not a census

Eight extracted orbital-launch records spanning 1965 to 2024, each with year, mission, launch site, operating bloc, outcome and an inferred site-activity flag, cross-checked against the GCAT catalogue methodology.

Coverage note — this extraction is not exhaustive. The shaped result contains only 8 spot-check rows, one per sampled year, drawn from the orbitalradar.com launch database. A source-integrity check of the live GCAT launch file at planet4589.org shows that its 1957 section alone contains hundreds of records — the underlying catalogue is vastly broader than this sample. No all-time totals, trends or comprehensive claims should be read from this page; it presents the sampled rows as-is.

Eight sampled launches on the 1957–2026 timeline

One dot per extracted launch · x-axis: year of launch · hover a dot for mission, site, bloc and outcome

State bloc — Soviet / Russian rocket and space forces Commercial operator — SpaceX

Search the sampled launches

Year	Mission	Launch site	Operating bloc	Outcome	Site active	Source

Seven of the eight sampled launches lifted off from just two Soviet-era cosmodromes — Baikonur and Plesetsk — under Soviet or Russian rocket and space forces; only the 2024 Starlink Group 12-6 flight from Kennedy Space Center belongs to a commercial operator, SpaceX. orbitalradar.com

Every one of the eight sampled launches is recorded as a success — no conclusion about reliability should follow, since the sample was a spot check, not a random draw. orbitalradar.com

GCAT defines an orbital launch by LaunchCode first letter O, with a second letter S, F or U for success, failure or unknown, and optional partial-success percentages such as OS80 — the authoritative basis for classifying rows like these. planet4589.org

The "site active" flags shown are inferences from the extraction, not authoritative: a rigorous flag should be derived from the TStop field of GCAT's sites table, and "operating bloc" should be normalized from GCAT's Launch_Agency — the organization responsible for launch services, often different from the payload owner — rather than from site sovereignty. planet4589.org

Method: 8 spot-check rows extracted from the orbitalradar.com launch database (one sampled orbital launch per selected year, 1965–2024), each carrying year, mission, launch site, operating bloc, outcome, an inferred site-activity flag and its source URL. Exact launch dates were not present in the extraction. Classification and terminology follow GCAT (planet4589.org), Release 1.8.5 (2026 Aug 8), data update 2026 Aug 21: LaunchCode O marks orbital launches; S/F/U suffixes mark success, failure or unknown. A diagnostic read of the live GCAT launch.tsv confirms the full catalogue holds hundreds of 1957 records alone; those raw rows were used only to verify breadth and are not displayed. The sample is not exhaustive and supports no all-time totals.