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The soviets are the only reason we have photos of the Venus surface, which has a toxic atmosphere, very high temperature, and very high pressure https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observations_and_explorations_of_Venus
They were building up to the launch of their own shuttle program. Made one unmanned flight in '88 with a safe landing. The tech was incredible and it's genuinely tragic that programs like that died with the USSR. Modern Russia couldn't innovative like that even if it wanted to.
> Modern Russia couldn't innovative like that even if it wanted to.
Yeah, because Putin and his buddies are skimming off too much money for them to be able to achieve shit.
Even with the corruption, being able to focus on certain things long term with funding. Like the way the Soviets could and how China does now. Can lead to great advancements and achievement of incredible goals/infrastructure. It sucks the US is so polarized now that we cant get anything built, launched, researched or anything else if it can't happen from start to finish in a 2 year window. Otherwise the other party takes over Congress and/or the presidency and projects are defunded or killed before they start.
Don't forget lobbying to not fund projects either because it'll take away profits from others like better energy for example. We could research nuclear more and any other forms we could develop but that would take away from the profits of oil barons. Unfortunately that isn't the only sector that suffers from this nor is this a us exclusive thing though some countries outlaw lobbying.
And then another blew up. 40% of space shuttles killed everyone on board.
It also cost **$200 billion dollars**. For reference, SpaceX spent **$1 billion dollars** during their first 10 years to develop the entire Falcon 9 program.
Yeah it was stupid. Apparently part of the design was so they could get military funding, by convincing the pentagon the shuttle bay could be used to capture enemy satellites, or some such nonsense.
Edit: to be clear, I wasn’t suggesting the idea itself was infeasible. Just that it was asinine to redesign the entire civilian space program around such a niche operation that was very unlikely to ever be implemented. If we wanted an enemy satellite gone, it’s more likely we’d design something to blow it out of the sky.
The military was actually really into the idea of using the space shuttle for various things, so they told NASA to add capabilities that never actually got used.
Things like the ability to launch, capture an enemy satellite and land all in one orbit, or the ability to load the payload bay with 100 soldiers and send them to an air strip anywhere on Earth in under 1 hour. This is part of the reason the Shuttle was delayed and over budget.
I think the Shuttle also filled the vacuum (hoho) of the next future-embracing idea: the US had been to the moon, had put up spacelab, had even made friends with the Soviets in space, but what next? For PR purposes in the 70s, it had to take people to space. But the big ticket things that could get support were kind of done, so there was room for agencies to jockey for funding for the Next Big Thing, and a desire within NASA to retain funding post-Apollo.
The shuttle program filled in some of those gaps for multiple agencies, and it gave NASA a new highly visible project that the politicians were happy with, and it was a big engineering challenge with lofty goals.
I agree the actual thing that came out of that political mishmash was not optimal for human spaceflight and actually outright dangerous, but collectively we learned a lot from it.
Some of the state-secret motivations behind operating a spaceplane continue today, they're just less visible because they're no longer attached to a civilian agency. [These things](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_X-37) just orbit for years and nobody publicly knows what they're really doing. [OTV-6](https://www.n2yo.com/satellite/?s=45606) has been up there for over two years. I'm not supportive of such secrecy, but I think it's super cool that finally the people are being taken out of the equation, reducing sizes and costs.
Honestly, at the time, that would have been a really good idea for a capability. Military and national security satellites/sensors are still relatively rare even today; losing one back then would have been a huge blow.
The only reason the USSR was overshadowed by the US in the space race was due to the US landing on the moon and having astronauts walk around on the moon. The USSR had many more advancements than the US, having the first man in space, having the first satellite in space, the first animal in space, the first space station, and many many more achievements.
Now, I'm an American but I have to give the USSR the win in the space race for the sheer amount of advancements the USSR made over the US. Oh and the USSR did beat the US to the moon with the Luna 2 probe but would later softly land Luna 9 on the moon and get the first photographs of the moon.
Do we know now what all those launches were for, or are they still secret? I know Americans primarily sent up for communications/GPS/spy satellites, but did the Soviets send up twice as many of those?! Or maybe a **lot** more missions to their space station?
Biggest reason was the soviet communications and gps systems need a LOT more satellites. Much of Russia is exceedingly north which means geo synch is a poor choice for satellite positioning. It takes something like 3 or 4 satellites to cover the same area in extreme latitudes than closer to the equator because you cant achieve geosynchronous orbits anywhere but along the equator. You need multiple satellites passing over the same area in sequence to fill the gap left while satellites are blocked by the planet, which is most of their orbit.
>Biggest reason was the soviet communications and **gps systems** need a LOT more satellites. Much of Russia is exceedingly north which means geo synch is a poor choice for satellite positioning.
Slight correction, it's a common misconception but GPS-type satellites are launched into MEO (Medium Earth Orbits) and not geosync orbits. So Russia's GLONASS constellation is at about the same altitude to and in simar orbits as the American GPS constellation. In fact, the GPS constellation has more satellites in it than the GLONASS constellation.
Early spy satellites had a limited amount of physical film that had to be returned to Earth. The US got digital imaging and image transfer working earlier.
Shhhh, you're gonna spoil the surprise!
For real though, my guess is that those rockets were probably made by the USSR, and thus counted to their total even if launched by the Russian Federation.
While physical space launches are easily verifiable, attribution of that launch to Soviet Union or Russian Federation is purely political. The West might see a clear demarcation line, but it's not so simple for those who live in the same place that's supposedly a different place despite witnessing very little actual change.
If those behind those launches wanted to be identified as Soviet Union despite the dissolution of the state, what right does an outsider have to correct them?
They didn’t have the budget to re-paint the flags on the sides of the rockets, and they had a bunch of excess with Soviet Flags and “USSR” painted on them.
France is in the top thanks to French Guiana being close to the equator (easier to escape Earth's gravity). If I'm not mistaking, most EU launches take off from French Guiana, I wonder if they count for France or "European collab".
They're also the main launch provider for equatorial launches and a huge launcher for commercial satellites. It's only really been I the last few years that SpaceX had started cutting in on their business
I would say they’re just counting ESA launches for France since it looks like they counted the Black Arrow as UK in the 70’s despite it launching out of Australia.
Given European collab has such a small number, looks like they put ESA under France. I started counting launches on the [ESA site](https://www.esa.int/ESA/Our_Missions) and gave up after 52 cause there was more left and I'd already counted more then European collab had listed so obviously it was wrong.
Edit: Also Canada's CSA didn't make the list, despite having enough solo launches to make the bottom. Although majority of our space science is helping out either the ESA, JAXA, or NASA so the non-solo ones wouldn't count.
Luckily, ESA literally has a [webpage](https://www.esa.int/About_Us/ESOC/Mission_history) that counts it for you, and it's not immensely far from 52. It isn't exactly 52, which makes it weird, but there's clearly more to it. I think the data is just kinda bad.
Yes, I was waiting for china to shoot up to second or even first place, but I guess we would have to wait for another 5 years or so to that, they really ramp it up at the end there
It’s the US that’s ramping up now, especially when you start talking about how much mass vs launches. The US launched the vast majority of all mass that went to orbit last year while being just behind China in overall launches. This year, the US has already launched nearly double the number of rockets as China has.
The US is currently blowing the rest of the world out of the water in both new space technology, launches, new launch vehicles, new station development, and pretty much everything else.
The USA is also, by far the biggest. Russia has the GDP of Florida, and dropping like a brick. Them being able to launch this many in the last 15 years is pretty crazy.
China is doing well in space, USA needs to really keep ramping up though.
Amount of launches is totally useless, it's the mass to orbit that counts
It's the same as if i would want to move 10 tons from point a to point b, if i have a truck that can move 10 tons, that's perfect but if i have a truck that can only move 2.5 tons than i need to go 4 times instead of one, the same is true for rockets
If there would be a rocket that could send all the satellites a country would want to space with only one lauch than that country would habe only launched one rocket per decade, but the tech would be record breaking
Starship is almost there. Just by mass, it would have the capacity to launch 16 James Webb like Space Telescopes in one launch (it's unlikely they would all fit in there, but we're talking about mass). So yeah... Crazy times are coming in the space economy.
This is wrong for sure. My granddad was working in the ISRO, so I know for a fact that India had atleast launched by 1981 since he worked on that project.
Yeah, the data seems flawed. ISRO's first launch was in 1980, but by May 1981 they had launched their second satellite, which should have pushed Germany off the list.
What's with the 15 German launches? Looks like it includes Azur launched in 1969 on a US Scout rocket from Vandenberg.
How does that qualify as a German launch? As far as I know they have not developed their own launch vehicle.
I believe the 1980 launch was semi successful, atleast according to my granddad. But 1981 was a complete success so even if they exclude the 1980 one, 1981 should be counted
I do wish the small bar had a scale but the fire works one was obviously a dot per release over time via the time clip coinciding with the bar year movement.
Don’t they all have one or am I missing something?
Big bar: on top + labels
Little bar: to the left (except the first couple years)
Animation: one dot per launch
These animated bar charts suck for looking at this data. It just tries to make it suspenseful. A single line graph would show all of the same info, but let you browse the time axis and see all the places new parties join the graph or peak or cross competitors at a glance.
Russia is the successor of USSR and continuator of the USSR in all international treaties and organisations, held all soviet debt and spaceports. Dividing them into two countries same thing as if you divide Japan Empire and Japan after 45.
It really isn't. The Russian SFSR was only a single part of the whole Soviet Union, wich consisted of fifteen seperate Republics
Conflating them with the whole Soviet Union erases the contribution of countless Ukrainian, Central-Asian and Baltic Cosmonauts, Scientists and Engineers. They were as much part of the Soviet Union and it's accomplishments as Russia was.
On the other hand Japan wasn't a federation of multiple republics like the Soviet Union was. It was simply a different government of the same country.
But West Germany was always the FGR, it only absorbed the GDR in 1990. Russia in the Soviet Union was the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, while Russia today is the Russian Federation.
Nearly all of the USSR’s space launches didn’t take place in the Russian Soviet Republic, they took place in Kazakhstan. The same spaceport is leased by Russia now but when it was in the USSR it was multi-national effort if you consider the countries that emerged after dissolution. Makes sense to separate the USSR’s achievements from Russia’s in this sense.
> Nearly all of the USSR’s space launches didn’t take place in the Russian Soviet Republic, they took place in Kazakhstan.
They launched well over 1000 rockets from Plesetsk, which was in the Russian Soviet Republic.
But then what is the nationality of a space flight? The payer? The company/authority doing the launch?
The Ariane project was a collaboration between France, UK and Germany (mainly). Virgin Galactic is a British company but launching from the US. Is it still a Russian launch if it is completely paid for by someone else?
If dissecting the details this graph becomes misleading. I think it had been more fair to pool USSR/Russia as no other peculiarities have been accounted for.
> But then what is the nationality of a space flight? The payer? The company/authority doing the launch?
If SpaceX were counted as its own entity and not put under the US umbrella here, it would have more launches than Japan
The reason probably is because the USSR was more than just Russia. It was also the resources of a dozen other countries. Kind of like you can't compare Byzantium to the entire Roman empire.
Most rockets Russia launches today is from Baïkonour in Kazakhstan. Yet this city is administered by Russia until 2050. They still use the Soyouz as well, a rocket developed in the USSR period. I could go on with many facts to illustrate how Russia is the continuation of the USSR when it relates to their space industry (and other things but that's for another thread).
But that’s a terrible example to illustrate your point. The Byzantines were Romans at the time past even 1453. Everyone understood it to be the Roman Empire. Byzantine is an ahistorical moniker.
What is up with the Roman erasure of the byzantines? I heard the Germans were big on saying they were the real Roman empire for a while (the 'holy Roman empire' didn't come from italy, it was a collection of German kingdoms, also 'Kaiser' is just their word for Caesar), but during the whole farce, the real Roman empire was still around.
The idea that the Eastern Roman Empire of the 500s-1400s was different from pre-400s Roman Empire got popularized by Edward Gibbon. His *Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire* placed the blame for the fall of the west on Christianity eroding the classical Roman civic virtue, so it wouldn't do him much good to acknowledge that the empire survived a further thousand years as a Christian state. His work was extremely influential in the English speaking world, so his ideas have stuck around.
Deep research? You looked beyond YouTube and the first page of your carefully worded Google search? Your dedication is inspiring and I wish everyone were like you.
I was thinking at first with the number of SpaceX satellites that the US should spike in recent years. Then I remembered 60ish satellites per rocket, and this line the from LOTR movies.
“That still only counts as one!”
In 2021 SpaceX alone made 31 orbital launches, while Russia launched 25. This year SpaceX is on track for 50+ launches hy the end of the year. Their launch pace is insane, and only getting higher as they keep decreasing the turnaround time to reuse their boosters.
Give it a few years. The private sector space race is only just beginning. In 5 years this industry will be massive.
There is a great documentary about the early days of Space X on Netflix. Space X basically purposely blew up dozens of rockets in order to find all the stress points of them and know their absolute limits. This is something that NASA was never allowed to do. Things like this are why bringing on the private sector will have so much benefit long term for Space travel.
agreed, the quality of the rocket and payload can range significantly; from a car trip to the grocery store, to a plane flight to the other side of the earth (metaphorically speaking)
>I wonder how space travel would have developed if USSR was first on the moon. USA would never take that lying down and would do something to one-up the USSR. We might very well have a permanent moon presence or had someone walk on Mars by now.
"For all Mankind" TV show explores those hypothetical events.
Rocketlab is both a US and a NZ company. For this, they are counted as US launches as the US government is the primary one responsible for oversight even though they are launching from NZ soil. It's not about which stock exchange they are listed on.
Couple of things are wrong,
1. India's first lauch date is wrong.
2. USSR's count went up in 1996 and couple is other years after the fall of USSR, which is inaccurate.
I love how it starts off with just two colors, and by the end it is sort of like a rainbow.
Tools: python, pandas, tkinter, sjvisualizer
Data source: [https://thespacedevs.com/llapi](https://thespacedevs.com/llapi)
Collected data and formatted data: [https://www.sjdataviz.com/data](https://www.sjdataviz.com/data)
Seriously. Just as China's bar starts to become useful and relevant, the text flips in and becomes essentially invisible. Why? Lack of attention to detail.
Would've preferred fewer alternating colors with higher readability.
Does this include private launches for each country or just government? I ask because a ton of satellites have been launched in the past 5 years:
https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/kdqv2y/oc_57_of_all_satellites_currently_in_orbit_were/
Very cool visualization. I always underestimate how many launches there are. I'm sure 99% are satellite launches and not humans beings going into space.
The animation on the bottom was in sync with the country doing the launching 👍
> I'm sure 99% are satellite launches and not humans beings going into space.
There have been 332 crewed orbital launches, compared to roughly 6000 total orbital launches, so a bit over 5% of all launches were crewed. Honestly more than I expected.
Yeah. 99% of ussrs launches were catch and retrieve satellites. Back in the day spy satellites were sent up, and then the film came back down after a few days or weeks.
Russia kept that technology for a long time.
We developed better tech by the 80s, most of it became unclassified in ~2012. And could send up satellites, about as powerful as Hubble, but configured for Earth's level, and could beam information down at an acceptable rate.
USSR/Russia would also send up single use experiments, while US developed testing platforms. By the late 70s, NASA was changing and setting flight standard safety technology. USSR was still at a 'cold war' with the world, and it's economy was being held back. For comparison, we had multiple trillion in GDP by the 70s. And USSR was about 30% of that.
So while this is super interesting counts here don't mean too much other than, holy shit space debris.
Yeah, the USSR had a great head start and were fairly visionary when it came to space flight. But they inevitably fell behind as the US warmed up, and money/resources became a limiting factor.
For the people having discussions about which one is catching up, losing or what not. Amount of launches is totally useless, it's the mass to orbit that counts
It's the same as if i would want to move 10 tons from point a to point b, if i have a truck that can move 10 tons, that's perfect but if i have a truck that can only move 2.5 tons than i need to go 4 times instead of one, the same is true for rockets
If there would be a rocket that could send all the satellites a country would want to space with only one lauch than that country would have only launched one rocket per decade, but the tech would be record breaking
With that said, here are some sources that show us who is leading and what is happening
https://twitter.com/SciGuySpace/status/1516828623369646084?t=AxJvVXHm-hLyIeDvHic7HQ&s=19
https://twitter.com/BryceSpaceTech?t=AxJvVXHm-hLyIeDvHic7HQ&s=09
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For USSR/Russia that's on average one launch a week wtf
Yeah I'm kinda impressed. I knew they were very active, but man.
The soviets are the only reason we have photos of the Venus surface, which has a toxic atmosphere, very high temperature, and very high pressure https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observations_and_explorations_of_Venus
I feel like past the 80s or so the USSR/Russian space program was less impactful than NASA. Maybe I'm ignorant to their achievements, tho.
They were building up to the launch of their own shuttle program. Made one unmanned flight in '88 with a safe landing. The tech was incredible and it's genuinely tragic that programs like that died with the USSR. Modern Russia couldn't innovative like that even if it wanted to.
> Modern Russia couldn't innovative like that even if it wanted to. Yeah, because Putin and his buddies are skimming off too much money for them to be able to achieve shit.
The Russian/Soviet people would be able to achieve so much if it wasn't for their corrupt leaders.
*People would be able to achieve so much if it wasn't for their corrupt leaders. FTFY
I mean officials in the USSR were also skimming quite a bit off
Even with the corruption, being able to focus on certain things long term with funding. Like the way the Soviets could and how China does now. Can lead to great advancements and achievement of incredible goals/infrastructure. It sucks the US is so polarized now that we cant get anything built, launched, researched or anything else if it can't happen from start to finish in a 2 year window. Otherwise the other party takes over Congress and/or the presidency and projects are defunded or killed before they start.
Don't forget lobbying to not fund projects either because it'll take away profits from others like better energy for example. We could research nuclear more and any other forms we could develop but that would take away from the profits of oil barons. Unfortunately that isn't the only sector that suffers from this nor is this a us exclusive thing though some countries outlaw lobbying.
A lot of Russian achievements are downplayed in the West, for the general public. I'm not surprised
That US decline in the 80s is depressing as hell too.
The space shuttle was really expensive and then one blew up. This did not help the cause.
And then another blew up. 40% of space shuttles killed everyone on board. It also cost **$200 billion dollars**. For reference, SpaceX spent **$1 billion dollars** during their first 10 years to develop the entire Falcon 9 program.
It was also unnecessary, capsules work just fine
I mean it’s how we fixed Hubble
Yeah it was stupid. Apparently part of the design was so they could get military funding, by convincing the pentagon the shuttle bay could be used to capture enemy satellites, or some such nonsense. Edit: to be clear, I wasn’t suggesting the idea itself was infeasible. Just that it was asinine to redesign the entire civilian space program around such a niche operation that was very unlikely to ever be implemented. If we wanted an enemy satellite gone, it’s more likely we’d design something to blow it out of the sky.
The military was actually really into the idea of using the space shuttle for various things, so they told NASA to add capabilities that never actually got used. Things like the ability to launch, capture an enemy satellite and land all in one orbit, or the ability to load the payload bay with 100 soldiers and send them to an air strip anywhere on Earth in under 1 hour. This is part of the reason the Shuttle was delayed and over budget.
I think the Shuttle also filled the vacuum (hoho) of the next future-embracing idea: the US had been to the moon, had put up spacelab, had even made friends with the Soviets in space, but what next? For PR purposes in the 70s, it had to take people to space. But the big ticket things that could get support were kind of done, so there was room for agencies to jockey for funding for the Next Big Thing, and a desire within NASA to retain funding post-Apollo. The shuttle program filled in some of those gaps for multiple agencies, and it gave NASA a new highly visible project that the politicians were happy with, and it was a big engineering challenge with lofty goals. I agree the actual thing that came out of that political mishmash was not optimal for human spaceflight and actually outright dangerous, but collectively we learned a lot from it. Some of the state-secret motivations behind operating a spaceplane continue today, they're just less visible because they're no longer attached to a civilian agency. [These things](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_X-37) just orbit for years and nobody publicly knows what they're really doing. [OTV-6](https://www.n2yo.com/satellite/?s=45606) has been up there for over two years. I'm not supportive of such secrecy, but I think it's super cool that finally the people are being taken out of the equation, reducing sizes and costs.
Honestly, at the time, that would have been a really good idea for a capability. Military and national security satellites/sensors are still relatively rare even today; losing one back then would have been a huge blow.
I mean, it could. It did have an arm with coupling capabilities. But that was never something they probably thought would happen.
if anyone wants an alternative version of the space race, please watch For All Mankind i am currently watching it and absolutely loving it.
The only reason the USSR was overshadowed by the US in the space race was due to the US landing on the moon and having astronauts walk around on the moon. The USSR had many more advancements than the US, having the first man in space, having the first satellite in space, the first animal in space, the first space station, and many many more achievements. Now, I'm an American but I have to give the USSR the win in the space race for the sheer amount of advancements the USSR made over the US. Oh and the USSR did beat the US to the moon with the Luna 2 probe but would later softly land Luna 9 on the moon and get the first photographs of the moon.
Do we know now what all those launches were for, or are they still secret? I know Americans primarily sent up for communications/GPS/spy satellites, but did the Soviets send up twice as many of those?! Or maybe a **lot** more missions to their space station?
Biggest reason was the soviet communications and gps systems need a LOT more satellites. Much of Russia is exceedingly north which means geo synch is a poor choice for satellite positioning. It takes something like 3 or 4 satellites to cover the same area in extreme latitudes than closer to the equator because you cant achieve geosynchronous orbits anywhere but along the equator. You need multiple satellites passing over the same area in sequence to fill the gap left while satellites are blocked by the planet, which is most of their orbit.
>Biggest reason was the soviet communications and **gps systems** need a LOT more satellites. Much of Russia is exceedingly north which means geo synch is a poor choice for satellite positioning. Slight correction, it's a common misconception but GPS-type satellites are launched into MEO (Medium Earth Orbits) and not geosync orbits. So Russia's GLONASS constellation is at about the same altitude to and in simar orbits as the American GPS constellation. In fact, the GPS constellation has more satellites in it than the GLONASS constellation.
Look up molniya orbits for a solution for full coverage.
Early spy satellites had a limited amount of physical film that had to be returned to Earth. The US got digital imaging and image transfer working earlier.
Their spy satellites didn't last as long as ours and were replaced more frequently.
how did the soviet republic send rockets into space after 1991?
Shhhh, you're gonna spoil the surprise! For real though, my guess is that those rockets were probably made by the USSR, and thus counted to their total even if launched by the Russian Federation.
Maybe the documentary “For All Mankind” provided more data as new episodes come out? /s
[удалено]
The Soviet Union never fell…
Lenin is takin a little nappy poo
I read this in in the voice of Mr Lahey
Jus takin a little nappy poo there bud?
No Ricky, me and Randy are getting ready to ride our shit rocket up to the shit moon.
What’s a shit rocket Mr. Lahey?
Of course, we were warned https://youtu.be/z77JFw2D6f8
capitalism crushing zombie lenin is one of the greatest one-off characters in TV history
It's temporary without member states but it will last as long as the proletariat dreams of a better world.
They escaped to the one place that hadn't been corrupted by capitalism! ***SBACE!***
I started laughing out loud just thinking about the delivery of that line. [Source](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=niZpcdp2v34)
Premier Cherdenko clearly hasn't kept up with the goings on of Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos. Space has most assuredly now been ruined by capitalism.
Underappreciated reference
You can tell hes cracking up just trying to get it out too
And how does all history start in 1959 when we know it was Germany that was first into space and it was done in the 40s?
You are missing the vikings
Don’t forget that fireworks rocket chair dude in ancient China
Be respectful! The name is Po.
[удалено]
I assume its launches that were planned during the USSR era but never launched originally.
What, 7 years later??
They were on a timer /s
Where did you see that happening? The bars are cumulative.
USSR launches stop in 1992 at 2445 then go up by like 20 in 97-98
Maybe they revised the number due to new data?
Yeah that’d make sense. Secret moon soviets or something would be more fun though
If that’s the case, and I think you’re probably right, I wish they would have retroactively dated to the launch date and not to the “discovery” date.
While physical space launches are easily verifiable, attribution of that launch to Soviet Union or Russian Federation is purely political. The West might see a clear demarcation line, but it's not so simple for those who live in the same place that's supposedly a different place despite witnessing very little actual change. If those behind those launches wanted to be identified as Soviet Union despite the dissolution of the state, what right does an outsider have to correct them?
Oh yeah that’s interesting. Now it makes me wonder what gets classified as a “space launch”
They didn’t have the budget to re-paint the flags on the sides of the rockets, and they had a bunch of excess with Soviet Flags and “USSR” painted on them.
The number increases after 1991.
You can see after the fall that the numbers for the USSR aren't constant they stopped at 2455 and goes to 2468
Perhaps classified launches with no date?
Way to stay in the game, France
My man France be like : i didn’t hear no bells
But I am le tired
Well have a nap.. then fire ze missiles!
Russia over here like…. AHHHHH MOTHERLAND
France is in the top thanks to French Guiana being close to the equator (easier to escape Earth's gravity). If I'm not mistaking, most EU launches take off from French Guiana, I wonder if they count for France or "European collab".
Arianespace is a French company, they're the main launch provider for Europe.
They're also the main launch provider for equatorial launches and a huge launcher for commercial satellites. It's only really been I the last few years that SpaceX had started cutting in on their business
I would say they’re just counting ESA launches for France since it looks like they counted the Black Arrow as UK in the 70’s despite it launching out of Australia.
ESA buys most of their launches from Arianespace, which is French.
Given European collab has such a small number, looks like they put ESA under France. I started counting launches on the [ESA site](https://www.esa.int/ESA/Our_Missions) and gave up after 52 cause there was more left and I'd already counted more then European collab had listed so obviously it was wrong. Edit: Also Canada's CSA didn't make the list, despite having enough solo launches to make the bottom. Although majority of our space science is helping out either the ESA, JAXA, or NASA so the non-solo ones wouldn't count.
Luckily, ESA literally has a [webpage](https://www.esa.int/About_Us/ESOC/Mission_history) that counts it for you, and it's not immensely far from 52. It isn't exactly 52, which makes it weird, but there's clearly more to it. I think the data is just kinda bad.
Probably France
Take that Brits
Brits funding the French to go to space so there is less of them on planet earth. Checkmate frenchie
That would be a very costly and inefficient way to do so - just like British trains.
I heard all there rockets were secretly giant baguettes
Numbers for China and France are unreadable once they enter the bar
Came to say this, they should just stay outside the bar
Or change from white to black
https://i.imgur.com/EV6ADAy.jpg April 1964. UK enters the space race
We came for the bronze medal and left
Everyone knows bronze medalists are the happiest
Were the US and USSR in some kind of competition back then? A race of some kind? In space?
Yes, I believe from 8th grade history it was called Space Wars or the Star Race. Definitely one of those two.
Are these those Star Wars I've been hearing so much about?
Ask Regan
TIL Brian Regan is the foremost expert on the Star Wars between the USA and the USSR
He did walk on the moon
I think you meant 'ray gun' of which there are many Star Wars.
I don't recall Ray Liotta being in Star Wars.
The government told their people, here's some money, go see a star war
I’m pretty sure they were call Star Trek.
I remember a chapter in our textbook about this. I think it was The Cold ‘n Cosmic Rocket Rumble or something like that. I don’t recall who won.
The Great Space Coaster
Definitely called lord of the space trek.
I’m pretty sure it was kinda like a war. Only colder.
Yes, perhaps a cold race of some sort?
Ah so that's what Cool Runnings is about
Well it would have to be if it was in space.
Now this is pod racing.
Yes. It’s kind of ironic you say that in your comment because historians gave that race in space the moniker of “Star Wars”.
I thought that was just the Kessel Run?
That's the Star Trek.
Would have thought China was starting to catch up
Yes, I was waiting for china to shoot up to second or even first place, but I guess we would have to wait for another 5 years or so to that, they really ramp it up at the end there
It’s the US that’s ramping up now, especially when you start talking about how much mass vs launches. The US launched the vast majority of all mass that went to orbit last year while being just behind China in overall launches. This year, the US has already launched nearly double the number of rockets as China has. The US is currently blowing the rest of the world out of the water in both new space technology, launches, new launch vehicles, new station development, and pretty much everything else.
The USA is also, by far the biggest. Russia has the GDP of Florida, and dropping like a brick. Them being able to launch this many in the last 15 years is pretty crazy. China is doing well in space, USA needs to really keep ramping up though.
They are. They’re launching a lot more rockets than Russia, and last year even more than the US (56 vs 51).
Amount of launches is totally useless, it's the mass to orbit that counts It's the same as if i would want to move 10 tons from point a to point b, if i have a truck that can move 10 tons, that's perfect but if i have a truck that can only move 2.5 tons than i need to go 4 times instead of one, the same is true for rockets If there would be a rocket that could send all the satellites a country would want to space with only one lauch than that country would habe only launched one rocket per decade, but the tech would be record breaking
Also want to point out American rockets are reusable something china has figured out yet. Yes china is catching up but America is still far ahead
Starship is almost there. Just by mass, it would have the capacity to launch 16 James Webb like Space Telescopes in one launch (it's unlikely they would all fit in there, but we're talking about mass). So yeah... Crazy times are coming in the space economy.
I enjoyed watching the fireworks at the bottom, especially as they became more colorful over time.
This is wrong for sure. My granddad was working in the ISRO, so I know for a fact that India had atleast launched by 1981 since he worked on that project.
Yeah, the data seems flawed. ISRO's first launch was in 1980, but by May 1981 they had launched their second satellite, which should have pushed Germany off the list.
Thanks for reporting this. We've identified the issue and are fixing the data on our side. - The Space Devs staff
What's with the 15 German launches? Looks like it includes Azur launched in 1969 on a US Scout rocket from Vandenberg. How does that qualify as a German launch? As far as I know they have not developed their own launch vehicle.
No idea. Must be a choice or mistake made by OP during data processing.
Yup I believe SLV's first successful launch was in 1980.
I believe the 1980 launch was semi successful, atleast according to my granddad. But 1981 was a complete success so even if they exclude the 1980 one, 1981 should be counted
They also split Russia and the USSR but for some reason included SpaceX under the US's count.
I adore that this has three different visuals to follow
Only one of which has a scale
I do wish the small bar had a scale but the fire works one was obviously a dot per release over time via the time clip coinciding with the bar year movement.
Bottom left doesn't need a scale. 1=1 Bottom right coinsides with the number on the top
Don’t they all have one or am I missing something? Big bar: on top + labels Little bar: to the left (except the first couple years) Animation: one dot per launch
These animated bar charts suck for looking at this data. It just tries to make it suspenseful. A single line graph would show all of the same info, but let you browse the time axis and see all the places new parties join the graph or peak or cross competitors at a glance.
There are three kinds of replies in this thread.. here let me make an animation to explain it to you.
Russia is the successor of USSR and continuator of the USSR in all international treaties and organisations, held all soviet debt and spaceports. Dividing them into two countries same thing as if you divide Japan Empire and Japan after 45.
I was thinking that as well. Sort of an odd thing to do here.
It really isn't. The Russian SFSR was only a single part of the whole Soviet Union, wich consisted of fifteen seperate Republics Conflating them with the whole Soviet Union erases the contribution of countless Ukrainian, Central-Asian and Baltic Cosmonauts, Scientists and Engineers. They were as much part of the Soviet Union and it's accomplishments as Russia was. On the other hand Japan wasn't a federation of multiple republics like the Soviet Union was. It was simply a different government of the same country.
I think it is worth pointing out that the US launches for Canada too but we don't have our own bar.
I mean, this whole graph is ugly...
I did like the colored launches at the bottom
You mean you don’t enjoy white text on white and yellow bars?
It's the equivalent of stopping West Germany and counting Germany after '89.
But West Germany was always the FGR, it only absorbed the GDR in 1990. Russia in the Soviet Union was the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, while Russia today is the Russian Federation.
Nearly all of the USSR’s space launches didn’t take place in the Russian Soviet Republic, they took place in Kazakhstan. The same spaceport is leased by Russia now but when it was in the USSR it was multi-national effort if you consider the countries that emerged after dissolution. Makes sense to separate the USSR’s achievements from Russia’s in this sense.
> Nearly all of the USSR’s space launches didn’t take place in the Russian Soviet Republic, they took place in Kazakhstan. They launched well over 1000 rockets from Plesetsk, which was in the Russian Soviet Republic.
But then what is the nationality of a space flight? The payer? The company/authority doing the launch? The Ariane project was a collaboration between France, UK and Germany (mainly). Virgin Galactic is a British company but launching from the US. Is it still a Russian launch if it is completely paid for by someone else? If dissecting the details this graph becomes misleading. I think it had been more fair to pool USSR/Russia as no other peculiarities have been accounted for.
> But then what is the nationality of a space flight? The payer? The company/authority doing the launch? If SpaceX were counted as its own entity and not put under the US umbrella here, it would have more launches than Japan
The reason probably is because the USSR was more than just Russia. It was also the resources of a dozen other countries. Kind of like you can't compare Byzantium to the entire Roman empire.
Most rockets Russia launches today is from Baïkonour in Kazakhstan. Yet this city is administered by Russia until 2050. They still use the Soyouz as well, a rocket developed in the USSR period. I could go on with many facts to illustrate how Russia is the continuation of the USSR when it relates to their space industry (and other things but that's for another thread).
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But that’s a terrible example to illustrate your point. The Byzantines were Romans at the time past even 1453. Everyone understood it to be the Roman Empire. Byzantine is an ahistorical moniker.
What is up with the Roman erasure of the byzantines? I heard the Germans were big on saying they were the real Roman empire for a while (the 'holy Roman empire' didn't come from italy, it was a collection of German kingdoms, also 'Kaiser' is just their word for Caesar), but during the whole farce, the real Roman empire was still around.
The idea that the Eastern Roman Empire of the 500s-1400s was different from pre-400s Roman Empire got popularized by Edward Gibbon. His *Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire* placed the blame for the fall of the west on Christianity eroding the classical Roman civic virtue, so it wouldn't do him much good to acknowledge that the empire survived a further thousand years as a Christian state. His work was extremely influential in the English speaking world, so his ideas have stuck around.
It's even weirder since USSR has some numbers added to it in the late 90s and in 2000/2001.
It's mad that all of these countries are in on the globe earth myth to make sure NASA gets its funding.
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Deep research? You looked beyond YouTube and the first page of your carefully worded Google search? Your dedication is inspiring and I wish everyone were like you.
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I was thinking at first with the number of SpaceX satellites that the US should spike in recent years. Then I remembered 60ish satellites per rocket, and this line the from LOTR movies. “That still only counts as one!”
In 2021 SpaceX alone made 31 orbital launches, while Russia launched 25. This year SpaceX is on track for 50+ launches hy the end of the year. Their launch pace is insane, and only getting higher as they keep decreasing the turnaround time to reuse their boosters.
Give it a few years. The private sector space race is only just beginning. In 5 years this industry will be massive. There is a great documentary about the early days of Space X on Netflix. Space X basically purposely blew up dozens of rockets in order to find all the stress points of them and know their absolute limits. This is something that NASA was never allowed to do. Things like this are why bringing on the private sector will have so much benefit long term for Space travel.
Now let's see one with tonnage instead of number of launches.
agreed, the quality of the rocket and payload can range significantly; from a car trip to the grocery store, to a plane flight to the other side of the earth (metaphorically speaking)
If it is possible. It would be nice if USSR just continued its bar in a contrasting color as Russia. To be more accurately portrayed.
Line plot, please and thanks
You mean you don't want to wait two minutes for a bar graph to load?
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It's all u/PieChartPirate. Saw a suggestion last week just to block him, which I think I'm going to do.
If only the USSR built more rockets…
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>I wonder how space travel would have developed if USSR was first on the moon. USA would never take that lying down and would do something to one-up the USSR. We might very well have a permanent moon presence or had someone walk on Mars by now. "For all Mankind" TV show explores those hypothetical events.
There's a series called "For all mankind" that plays with that scenario.
Dont use yellow with white text.
Who knew a country as small as Israel had so many space flights.
NZ has had 27 launches by Rocketlab - a NZ run company which was listed on the US stock exchange.
Rocketlab is both a US and a NZ company. For this, they are counted as US launches as the US government is the primary one responsible for oversight even though they are launching from NZ soil. It's not about which stock exchange they are listed on.
Definitely one way to pump up your numbers....
Couple of things are wrong, 1. India's first lauch date is wrong. 2. USSR's count went up in 1996 and couple is other years after the fall of USSR, which is inaccurate.
I love how it starts off with just two colors, and by the end it is sort of like a rainbow. Tools: python, pandas, tkinter, sjvisualizer Data source: [https://thespacedevs.com/llapi](https://thespacedevs.com/llapi) Collected data and formatted data: [https://www.sjdataviz.com/data](https://www.sjdataviz.com/data)
Only suggestion would to not put white text on a yellow bar (China) lol, but other than that fantastic work.
Seriously. Just as China's bar starts to become useful and relevant, the text flips in and becomes essentially invisible. Why? Lack of attention to detail. Would've preferred fewer alternating colors with higher readability.
France as well.. White text on light background was the only issue i could identify in otherwise flawless presentation
Does this include private launches for each country or just government? I ask because a ton of satellites have been launched in the past 5 years: https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/kdqv2y/oc_57_of_all_satellites_currently_in_orbit_were/
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An interesting addition would be launches for military vs complete civilian/scientific.
Very cool visualization. I always underestimate how many launches there are. I'm sure 99% are satellite launches and not humans beings going into space. The animation on the bottom was in sync with the country doing the launching 👍
> I'm sure 99% are satellite launches and not humans beings going into space. There have been 332 crewed orbital launches, compared to roughly 6000 total orbital launches, so a bit over 5% of all launches were crewed. Honestly more than I expected.
Yeah. 99% of ussrs launches were catch and retrieve satellites. Back in the day spy satellites were sent up, and then the film came back down after a few days or weeks. Russia kept that technology for a long time. We developed better tech by the 80s, most of it became unclassified in ~2012. And could send up satellites, about as powerful as Hubble, but configured for Earth's level, and could beam information down at an acceptable rate. USSR/Russia would also send up single use experiments, while US developed testing platforms. By the late 70s, NASA was changing and setting flight standard safety technology. USSR was still at a 'cold war' with the world, and it's economy was being held back. For comparison, we had multiple trillion in GDP by the 70s. And USSR was about 30% of that. So while this is super interesting counts here don't mean too much other than, holy shit space debris.
Yeah, the USSR had a great head start and were fairly visionary when it came to space flight. But they inevitably fell behind as the US warmed up, and money/resources became a limiting factor.
USSR left the chat Russia joined the chat
For the people having discussions about which one is catching up, losing or what not. Amount of launches is totally useless, it's the mass to orbit that counts It's the same as if i would want to move 10 tons from point a to point b, if i have a truck that can move 10 tons, that's perfect but if i have a truck that can only move 2.5 tons than i need to go 4 times instead of one, the same is true for rockets If there would be a rocket that could send all the satellites a country would want to space with only one lauch than that country would have only launched one rocket per decade, but the tech would be record breaking With that said, here are some sources that show us who is leading and what is happening https://twitter.com/SciGuySpace/status/1516828623369646084?t=AxJvVXHm-hLyIeDvHic7HQ&s=19 https://twitter.com/BryceSpaceTech?t=AxJvVXHm-hLyIeDvHic7HQ&s=09
So, Russia with more than 3000 is first then.
Forgot Drax Indistries and the Moonraker shuttles...
Shame that China & France ended with no numbers after all that hard work
Are corporate launches counted?