From the U.S. to North Korea: who launches rockets, and how often

Spaceflight used to belong to two countries. Roughly a dozen have now reached orbit under their own power, and the distance between the leaders and everyone else keeps growing. The countries that launch the most rockets are the U.S. and China, by a margin no other nation is close to closing. The cause is less national prestige than hardware and economics: reusable boosters, mass-produced satellites, and a commercial launch industry flying for paying customers rather than governments alone. Russia, which set the pace through the Soviet era and the decades that followed, now trails both.

A country's place in the launch rankings comes down to infrastructure. It needs a spaceport with a workable latitude and a safe downrange corridor over open water. It needs a domestic rocket industry that can turn out vehicles at a steady rate. And it needs customers — a national space agency, a military, or private companies with payloads waiting. The U.S. checks every box, largely because SpaceX turned Florida's Space Coast into the busiest stretch of launch pads on Earth. China has built an equivalent system around four state-run launch centers and a crop of private rocket startups. Everyone else is competing for a distant third.

The rest of this list covers the nations that matter for volume and the ones that matter for other reasons. India flies some of the cheapest reliable rockets available to foreign customers. Europe pools its launches through a single equatorial spaceport in French Guiana. New Zealand's standing comes entirely from a privately owned pad on its east coast. Japan is rebuilding its launch economics around a new vehicle. South Korea joined the club only in 2022. Iran and North Korea launch rarely, and every attempt is read as much for its missile implications as for its satellites. Orbital launch cadence now works as a rough proxy for industrial capacity, military reach and commercial ambition. That is why the ranking is worth watching over the next decade.

Illustration: Quartz

The United States launches more orbital rockets than any other country, and SpaceX's Falcon 9 accounts for most of them. The company flies from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station and Kennedy Space Center in Florida, and Vandenberg Space Force Base on California's central coast.

Reusability is the reason American launch numbers climbed so sharply. The Falcon 9 first stage returns to a landing zone or an offshore droneship after separation, gets inspected, and flies again. Individual boosters have flown more than 20 missions each. That collapses the gap between flights from months to weeks or days. No earlier launch vehicle operated at anything near that pace.

NASA still runs its own missions, but it no longer builds most of the rockets that carry them. The agency buys rides from commercial providers, chiefly SpaceX and United Launch Alliance, instead of owning the hardware. ULA's Vulcan Centaur, which took over from the retired Atlas V and Delta IV families, gives the country a second heavy-lift option for national security payloads.

Other American companies are widening the field. Blue Origin's New Glenn, a partially reusable heavy-lift rocket, launches from Cape Canaveral. Rocket Lab flies most Electron missions from New Zealand but operates a second pad at Wallops Island in Virginia, where it is developing the larger Neutron vehicle.

Florida's Space Coast now functions as the busiest launch corridor on the planet, with pads at Cape Canaveral and Kennedy sharing a single range. Vandenberg handles polar and sun-synchronous orbits, which require flying south over open ocean rather than east over the Atlantic — the trajectories used by most Earth-observation and reconnaissance satellites.

Demand comes from several directions at once. The Space Force certifies multiple providers so that no single company or rocket family becomes a chokepoint for national security launches. Commercial customers supply the rest. SpaceX's Starlink constellation is the largest single driver, requiring repeated flights to deploy and replenish thousands of satellites in low Earth orbit.

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China ranks second in the world for orbital launch attempts. Its Long March family, built by the state-owned China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation, carries most national missions and has flown in successive versions since 1970.

Four state-run launch centers divide the work. Jiuquan, in the Gobi Desert, handles crewed flights and a wide range of satellite missions. Xichang, in Sichuan province, sends payloads toward geostationary and lunar destinations. Taiyuan, in Shanxi province, specializes in polar orbits. Wenchang, on the island of Hainan, is the newest and the only coastal site. Its lower latitude and open water downrange make it the pad for China's heaviest rockets.

Private Chinese companies now account for a visible share of the launch total. Landspace, Galactic Energy and iSpace have each flown their own vehicles, and several are developing reusable first stages. Their rockets are smaller than the heavy Long March variants and aimed largely at satellite customers, after Beijing opened the sector to commercial firms as a way to pull down costs.

Demand comes from several directions at once. The Tiangong space station needs regular crew rotations and cargo resupply, which guarantees a baseline of flights. The Chang'e lunar program adds more, including a far-side sample return that depended on a dedicated relay satellite and narrow launch windows. Broadband constellations such as Guowang and Qianfan have started flying in batches, creating missions that did not exist a few years ago. Military and civilian satellites absorb much of the remaining capacity.

What China has not done yet is land and refly boosters as a matter of routine. Several of its private firms are flight-testing vertical landing vehicles modeled on the approach SpaceX proved with Falcon 9. None has reached that cadence.

Until one does, each Chinese launch largely consumes a newly built rocket, which caps how fast the country can scale. That technical gap, more than funding or ambition, explains the distance between second place and first.

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Russia still launches orbital rockets on a regular schedule, but its annual total now sits far below those of the U.S. and China. Flights lift off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, which Russia leases from the Kazakh government, and from the Vostochny Cosmodrome in the Amur region of the Far East.

The Soyuz family does most of the work. Its design lineage runs back to the R-7, the intercontinental ballistic missile that carried Sputnik to orbit in 1957. That long service record is why Russia keeps flying crews and cargo to the International Space Station on a predictable schedule. Reliability, not a recent technical leap, sustains the cadence.

Vostochny exists to cut reliance on a spaceport sitting outside Russian borders, where launches require lease payments and coordination with another government. Construction has run late and over budget, and several officials faced corruption prosecutions tied to the project. Much of the launch load has stayed at Baikonur longer than planned.

Sanctions imposed after the 2022 invasion of Ukraine removed a large share of Russia's commercial business. Western satellite operators canceled bookings. Soyuz flights from the Guiana Space Centre at Kourou ended, closing a partnership that had given Arianespace a medium-lift rocket alongside its own vehicles. The manifest narrowed to mostly domestic payloads as a result.

Roscosmos has also struggled to field a successor fleet. The Angara family, built to replace the aging Proton-M, has flown only a handful of times since its first test flight in 2014. Production rates remain well short of what a high-cadence program requires. Russian officials have described reusable rocket concepts, but none has reached orbital flight.

What remains is a program built around state needs: crewed station missions, military and navigation satellites, and occasional launches for partner governments. Russia no longer sets the global pace. It retains a capability — human spaceflight included — that only a few countries have ever built.

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India launches fewer rockets each year than the U.S. or China, but at a cost per mission that few national programs can match. The Indian Space Research Organisation flies the Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle and the Geosynchronous Satellite Launch Vehicle from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre on Sriharikota. The spaceport sits on a barrier island off the coast of Andhra Pradesh, and its east coast position lets rockets fly out over the Bay of Bengal, clear of populated land.

The PSLV built India's reputation abroad. Across decades of service it has carried domestic Earth observation and navigation satellites, along with a long roster of rideshare payloads from U.S., European and Japanese customers. A single PSLV flight in February 2017 deployed 104 satellites, a record at the time. Its pitch is straightforward: a dependable medium-lift rocket priced below most Western alternatives.

The GSLV lifts heavier payloads toward higher orbits using an indigenous cryogenic upper stage that took ISRO years to qualify. Its larger relative, the LVM3, launched Chandrayaan-3 in July 2023. That mission made India the fourth country to soft-land on the moon and the first to set down near the lunar south pole, in August 2023. The Mangalyaan orbiter reached Mars in September 2014 on India's first attempt at the planet, a result no other space agency has matched.

ISRO added the Small Satellite Launch Vehicle to compete for dedicated small-payload rides, the segment Rocket Lab's Electron serves internationally. The design trades payload capacity for a simpler, faster launch campaign.

India opened the launch sector to private companies in 2020. The policy shift produced startups including Skyroot Aerospace and Agnikul Cosmos, both developing small rockets of their own. It echoes, at smaller scale, the commercial opening that reshaped American spaceflight a decade earlier.

Gaganyaan, the country's crewed spaceflight program, would raise India's launch tempo once operational, since uncrewed test flights have to fly before any astronaut mission. Cost discipline rather than volume remains India's argument in the global launch market.

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Japan flies a small number of orbital missions each year through the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, or JAXA, launching mainly from the Tanegashima Space Center on an island south of Kyushu. Its primary vehicle is the H3, which replaced the H-IIA after more than two decades of service.

Engine development problems pushed the H3's first flight back by years. Its debut attempt in 2023 failed, and the rocket reached orbit on its second try in 2024.

Cost drove the H3's design. Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, the prime contractor, built the vehicle around a simpler main engine and more commercially available parts than the H-IIA used. The target is satellite business in a market reshaped by cheaper rides on Falcon 9. Japanese rockets had a strong reliability record paired with high prices, which worked while governments were the main customers.

The lighter Epsilon rocket covers small payloads. A failure shortly after liftoff in 2022 forced JAXA to destroy the vehicle in flight, and the program paused while engineers traced the cause.

Science missions account for a larger share of Japan's flights than they do for most launching nations. Hayabusa2 delivered samples from the asteroid Ryugu to Earth in 2020, the second Japanese spacecraft to bring back material from an asteroid. The H-II Transfer Vehicle hauled cargo to the International Space Station for more than a decade before retiring, with a successor designed to fly on the H3. Government payloads still anchor the manifest, including satellites for the Michibiki navigation system.

Private Japanese firms are working toward orbit too. Interstellar Technologies has flown suborbital rockets while developing an orbital vehicle. Space One launched its Kairos rocket from a purpose-built pad in Wakayama Prefecture, and its first attempts ended in failure.

Japan's annual launch total stays well below the leaders. The strategy is narrower: fly reliably, price competitively, and hold a position in deep-space science and station logistics.

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Nearly all of Europe's orbital launches lift off from a single site: the Guiana Space Centre at Kourou, in French Guiana, an overseas department of France on South America's northeastern coast. The pads there sit about five degrees north of the equator, closer than any other major orbital launch site.

That latitude does real work. A rocket leaving the ground near the equator picks up more speed from Earth's rotation, which converts into extra payload mass on missions bound for geostationary orbit. Flights head east over the Atlantic or north over open water, so the range rarely has to route around populated areas.

CNES, the French space agency, owns the spaceport. The European Space Agency flies its institutional missions from it, and Arianespace has sold launches there to commercial satellite operators since the early 1980s.

Ariane 5 carried most of that commercial business from its 1996 debut until its retirement in 2023, finishing with more than 100 flights. Many were dual-payload missions that stacked two large communications satellites inside a single fairing.

Its successor, Ariane 6, was designed to come in below the cost of the rocket it replaced, in a market reshaped by Falcon 9. Development slipped by several years. Europe spent a stretch with no heavy-lift vehicle of its own, and some European payloads moved onto American rockets instead.

The lighter end of the lineup belongs to Vega and the upgraded Vega-C, built largely by the Italian manufacturer Avio for Earth observation and small science satellites. A Vega-C failure in December 2022 grounded the vehicle until December 2024. That gap overlapped with the end of Soyuz flights from Kourou, which stopped in 2022 after Russia withdrew its personnel.

Europe's launch decisions run through a multinational structure rather than one government, with industrial work distributed among member states roughly in proportion to what each contributes. The arrangement spreads jobs across the continent but slows cost-cutting. No European reusable booster has reached orbit, and the continent's annual launch total stays well below those of the United States and China.

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New Zealand hosts more orbital launches than almost any other country its size, and every one of them belongs to a single company. Rocket Lab's Launch Complex 1, on the Mahia Peninsula on the North Island's east coast, is a privately owned and privately operated orbital launch site — a rarity in an industry built around government ranges.

Peter Beck founded Rocket Lab in New Zealand in 2006. The company is now headquartered in Long Beach, California, but its flight operations began on the Mahia coast and remain anchored there. The site's appeal is practical. Air traffic and shipping lanes near the peninsula are sparse, which widens the range of orbital trajectories available on a given day and cuts the scheduling conflicts that slow busier spaceports.

The New Zealand government built a legal framework to match. Parliament passed the Outer Space and High-altitude Activities Act in 2017, creating a licensing regime where none had existed. The country also signed a technology safeguards agreement with the U.S., which allows American-built hardware to fly from New Zealand soil.

Electron, the company's small-lift rocket, is sized for payloads measured in hundreds of kilograms rather than tons. That rules it out of the heavy constellation work filling American and Chinese manifests. It serves a different customer: a satellite operator who wants a dedicated flight to a chosen orbit on a chosen date, rather than a secondary slot on someone else's schedule.

Rocket Lab has also worked on recovering Electron's first stage. Boosters descend under parachute for retrieval at sea, and the company tried catching one in midair with a helicopter before setting that method aside.

Because New Zealand operates no national launch vehicle program, the country's annual total rises and falls with one company's manifest. Its standing among launching nations reflects commercial decisions and coastal geography rather than state ambition. Rocket Lab has since added a second pad at Wallops Island, Virginia, giving it U.S.-based capacity alongside Mahia.

Illustration: Quartz

Iran launches only a handful of orbital rockets in a typical year, and each attempt draws attention far beyond the size of its payload. Two separate efforts run in parallel: a civilian program under the Iranian Space Agency, and a military one operated by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Most flights lift off from the Imam Khomeini Space Center in Semnan province.

The Simorgh is the civilian program's main vehicle, a liquid-fueled rocket built to put small satellites into low Earth orbit. The Revolutionary Guard flies the Qased, which pairs a liquid first stage with solid upper stages, and the solid-fueled Qaem-100. Payloads have been compact imaging and communications satellites, not the multi-ton spacecraft that fill American, Chinese and European launch manifests.

U.S. and European governments treat Iranian launches as a proliferation issue rather than a scientific one. The propulsion and guidance work required to accelerate a satellite to orbital velocity carries over directly to long-range ballistic missiles. The two efforts draw on overlapping engineering, and the Revolutionary Guard's role in the military launch program reinforces that reading abroad.

Iran's record is uneven. Several Simorgh flights have failed to reach orbit, while other missions have placed satellites in space successfully. Russia has separately launched Iranian satellites on Russian rockets, including the Khayyam remote-sensing spacecraft, part of a broader military and technical relationship between Moscow and Tehran.

Sanctions keep Iran out of most international aerospace supply chains, pushing the program toward domestic production of engines, avionics and structures. That self-reliance has produced a working launch capability on a slow development cycle. Iranian engineers cannot buy proven hardware off the shelf or contract foreign specialists the way most national programs do.

Fewer than a dozen countries have independently developed and flown an orbital launch vehicle, and Iran is one of them. Its annual cadence stays in the low single digits, far below the volume of any major spacefaring nation, but the capability itself is rare.

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North Korea conducts a small number of orbital launch attempts, run by its National Aerospace Development Administration and flown from the Sohae Satellite Launching Station on the country's northwest coast. The rockets use the same long-range missile technology that underpins its weapons program. Each attempt is read abroad as a weapons test as much as a space mission.

United Nations Security Council resolutions prohibit North Korea from carrying out launches that use ballistic missile technology. That language covers satellite launches regardless of the stated civilian purpose. The booster that lifts a satellite to low Earth orbit and the booster that delivers a warhead share most of the same engineering. Pyongyang rejects that reading and maintains it has a sovereign right to a peaceful space program.

The country's Kwangmyongsong satellites reached orbit on more than one occasion, confirming that the Unha launch vehicle could complete a full ascent. Independent tracking later raised questions about whether some of those spacecraft ever transmitted or operated as intended. Reaching orbit and running a working satellite are separate engineering problems. The evidence that North Korea has solved the second is thinner than the evidence it has solved the first.

More recent work has centered on military reconnaissance satellites. South Korean officials have said Pyongyang received Russian technical help after ties between the two governments warmed. Imagery satellites would give North Korea its own view of South Korean and American military positions, a capability it has otherwise lacked.

Hard data on the program is scarce. North Korea discloses little, and most public information comes from South Korean, Japanese and U.S. military tracking, along with commercial satellite imagery of the Sohae site. Pad construction and vehicle movements at the site are often the first outside indication that a launch is coming.

Annual volume is negligible by global standards — a single attempt in a given year, or none at all. North Korea appears on this list for what its launches signal rather than for how often it flies them.