The numbers tell the story of how routine reaching orbit has become. By June 7, 2026 had already recorded 131 orbital launch attempts — 125 successes and 6 failures — with the year not yet half done. A decade ago that would have been an exceptional annual total; now it is a mid-year checkpoint.
Who is flying
The United States led with 81 launches (80 successful), China followed with 37 (34 successful), and Russia logged 8, all successful. The single biggest driver is SpaceX: the Falcon 9 family alone accounted for 66 flights with a perfect record over the period — 65 Falcon 9 Block 5 missions and one Falcon Heavy — much of it deploying the company's own Starlink constellation. SpaceX has signalled it expects roughly 140 to 145 Falcon 9 launches across the full year.
New vehicles entering service
Cadence is not the whole picture; the roster of available rockets is widening. The four-booster Ariane 64 flew its maiden mission on February 12, deploying 32 Amazon Leo satellites and notching the first successful orbital maiden flight of the year — a milestone for European heavy lift. Other debutants, including Soyuz-5, Tianlong-3, Long March 12B, Kinetica 2 and Ceres-2, joined the manifest, though several newcomers suffered the failures typical of first flights.
The throughline is a market in which access to orbit is cheap and frequent enough to sustain mega-constellations, and competitive enough that new launchers keep arriving. The constraint on what gets flown is shifting from the rockets to the payloads — and to the orbital traffic those launch rates are steadily filling up.
