Spaceflight went quiet for thirty years. Then 2021 broke the space race record.
An analysis of every orbital launch attempt from Sputnik 1 in October 1957 to 2022: 4,630 flights, 62 operators, 370 rockets and 158 launch sites.
4,630
launch attempts analysed, spanning 65 years of spaceflight
111
launches a year in the current era, against 81 at the height of the space race
89.9%
of all missions succeeded, 4,162 of 4,630 attempts
80%
of every launch ever flown was carried out by just ten organisations
The launch rate collapsed in 1979 and stayed flat for thirty six years. The era that began in 2016 averages 111 launches a year, well above the 81 a year flown at the height of the space race.
Method
How the analysis was built
The project follows the KDD process: selection, preprocessing, transformation, data mining, then interpretation. The source is a single record of global launch attempts, cleaned in pandas, with dates parsed to a yearly index and mission outcomes reduced to a binary success flag for rate comparisons.
The mining step is unsupervised. Latent Dirichlet Allocation was run over mission names and rocket names to test whether launch programmes separate into recoverable themes without being told what to look for. They do, and the topics split cleanly along Cold War and modern constellation lines.
A second stage attaches a 95 per cent Wilson interval to every operator's success rate, because a rate computed from two launches and one computed from 1,777 are not the same claim, and tests by permutation whether launch experience actually predicts reliability. It mostly does not, which is covered in the analysis.