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Tuesday, January 5, 2021
CONTINUITY: Orbital Launch Scorecard, 2020
Jonathan McDowell has published his “Space Activities in 2020” [PDF, 112 pages], with the authoritative data we have come to expect from this publication. Below is a summary I have extracted about orbital launch attempts in 2020 by country. There were a total of 114 orbital launch attempts from Earth in the year, of which 104 succeeded in placing their payloads in orbit. In addition, there was one successful orbital launch from the Moon, China's Chang'e 5 sample return ascender, which is not included in the table below.
| Country | Launches | Successes | Failures |
| China | 39 | 35 | 4 |
| U.S. | 37 | 34 | 3 |
| Russia | 12 | 12 | 0 |
| Europe | 10 | 9 | 1 |
| New Zealand | 7 | 6 | 1 |
| Japan | 4 | 4 | 0 |
| India | 2 | 2 | 0 |
| Iran | 2 | 1 | 1 |
| Israel | 1 | 1 | 0 |
| TOTAL | 114 | 104 | 10 |
Because it has become increasingly common to deploy multiple payloads from a single orbital launch, whether constellation deployments such as SpaceX's Starlink or ride-share and cubesat swarms, the statistics for payloads orbited look very different from those of launches. Here are payloads orbited in 2020 by country,
| Country | Payloads |
| U.S. | 979 |
| Europe | 129 |
| China | 74 |
| Other | 57 |
| Russia | 22 |
| TOTAL | 1261 |
Posted at January 5, 2021 11:50