Space · Launch Cadence
Orbital Launches per Year
Between 55 and 130 a year for four decades. Then 2020 happened.
- Bottomed at 55/yr in 2004
- SpaceX cadence + China growth post-2020
- 329 launches in 2025, a record
- Other trackers count 325 (Starship debate)
Annual orbital launch attempts ran between 55 and 130 from the 1980s through the 2010s, bottoming at 55 in 2004, shaped by Cold War demand decline and a limited commercial market. The 2020s broke that ceiling: Falcon 9 reusability collapsed turnaround time, China rapidly expanded its Long March family, and small launchers such as Rocket Lab’s Electron added cadence. 2025 set the record at 329 attempts, 170 of them SpaceX (165 Falcon 9 plus five Starship test flights), 52% of the world’s launches from one company. That is 2.76x the 1980s annual pace, and enough that a single year now delivers more than a quarter of what that entire decade managed: 329 against 1,193.
Every point is a recount of McDowell’s GCAT launch list under a single rule — launch classes O, D and N, excluding pad explosions and on-pad aborts — so the whole series regenerates from one downloaded file. Trackers differ slightly at the margin: BryceTech’s 2025 review counts 325 launches and 165 for SpaceX. It does not treat the five Starship test flights as orbital, which explains the SpaceX count exactly; its total is four below 329 rather than five because it also counts one more launch by other providers than GCAT does. Linear scale is intentional; the recent inflection is the whole story and a log scale would hide it.
| Year | Value | Note | Projected |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1960 | 38 | ||
| 1965 | 126 | ||
| 1970 | 124 | ||
| 1980 | 108 | ||
| 1990 | 121 | ||
| 2000 | 85 | ||
| 2010 | 74 | ||
| 2015 | 87 | ||
| 2018 | 114 | ||
| 2020 | 114 | ||
| 2021 | 146 | ||
| 2022 | 186 | ||
| 2023 | 223 | ||
| 2024 | 263 | 263 attempts (then a record) | |
| 2025 | 329 | 329, SpaceX 170 (52%) |