Spaceflight in 2018

Steph P. Bianchini June 21, 2019 4 Comments

This is the first of a series of post on spaceflight. (Almost) everybody knows and follows Space X’s amazing progress toward resuming human spaceflight from the US soil in these last years. More in general, space exploration news and missions have been attracting increasing attention around the world (think about ESA’s Rosetta, or New Horizons).

But what about numbers? Do you know how many rockets have been launched into space all in all last years? Dozens? Hundreds? Thousands? It comes out, not a lot of people know.

So here it is – nice stats about 2018 orbital flights:

=========================================================    
Vehicle            Overall           By Orbit Type
                   Launches      Earth-Orbit Earth-Escape
                  (Failures)      LEO   >LEO  Deep Space
=========================================================
CZ (DF-5)            34(0)       19(0)  15(0)    -
Falcon 9             20(0)       10(0)  10(0)    -
R-7                  15(1)       12(1)   3(0)    -
Ariane 5              6(1)         -     5(1)   1(0)
Atlas 5               5(0)         -     4(0)   1(0)
PSLV                  4(0)        3(0)   1(0)    -
H-2A                  3(0)        3(0)    -      -
CZ-11                 3(0)        3(0)    -      -
Electron              3(0)        3(0)    -      -
Proton                2(0)         -     2(0)    -
GSLV                  2(0)         -     2(0)    -
Antares               2(0)        2(0)    -      -
Vega                  2(0)        2(0)    -      -
Rokot/Briz KM         2(0)        2(0)    -      -
Delta 4 Heavy         1(0)         -      -     1(0)
Falcon Heavy          1(0)         -      -     1(0)
H-2B                  1(0)        1(0)    -      -
Delta 4M              1(0)        1(0)    -      -
GSLV Mk3              1(0)         -     1(0)    -
Soyuz 2-1v            1(0)        1(0)    -      -
Delta 2               1(0)        1(0)    -      -
Enhanced Epsilon      1(0)        1(0)    -      -
KZ-1A                 1(0)        1(0)    -      -
SS-520                1(0)        1(0)    -      -
ZQ-1                  1(1)        1(1)    -      -
---------------------------------------------------------
Total               114(3)       67(2)  43(1)   4(0) 

(Source: Space Launch Report, 2018. You can get the breakdown of 

statistics and a detailed analysis here: https://www.spacelaunchreport.com/log2018.html)
     

Interesting, isn’t it? Not that many, as it happens, and most of them are to launch satellites into Lower-Earth Orbit (LEO) or in GEO (Geosynchronous orbit). Now, it has not always been like that. In the past, we had years with more than 300 launches but also others with very few of them. Those numbers depend on a series of factors -ie, the number of states in the space race, the availability of launchers, existence/location of spaceports and so on. More on this in the following posts.