🚀 Progress: Reaching Orbit

Background: why this matters

This factor also pushes toward 'prospering'. Access to space isn't an abstract prestige race. Satellites underpin weather forecasting, climate monitoring, GPS navigation, disaster response, crop monitoring and global communications. Several of the other factors on this site depend on data from orbit, including the temperature records behind the Climate page. Launch capacity is also what makes planetary defence possible (see Asteroids), and in the long run it's the first step toward humanity not having all its eggs in one planetary basket.

The space age began with Sputnik on 4 October 1957. For decades launches were rare, expensive and almost entirely government-run. The big change of the past decade has been reusable rockets: in December 2015 SpaceX landed the first stage of an orbital Falcon 9 rocket, and booster reuse has since become routine. That drove down costs and made mass-produced satellite constellations possible. China has also built up a high launch cadence, and new rockets from other companies and countries are entering service.

More launches bring new problems. The number of satellites in low Earth orbit has grown very quickly, which raises the risk of collisions. In 1978 NASA scientist Donald Kessler described how debris from collisions could cause more collisions in a runaway cascade, now called the Kessler syndrome. Astronomers have also raised concerns about satellite trails interfering with observations. Agencies such as ESA's Space Debris Office track this risk.

This factor counts successful orbital launches worldwide in the last 30 days using Launch Library 2, a community-maintained database run by The Space Devs. For context, there were roughly 8 per month in 2019 and 21 per month in 2024. It's a measure of industrial capability and ambition. It doesn't measure the value of what's launched, and a single company's schedule can move the number a lot.

What people watch: launch cadence and reliability; progress on fully reusable heavy rockets; Earth-observation and science missions; space-debris mitigation rules; and lunar programmes.