r/spaceflight • u/Maximum-Resource9514 • 19d ago
The Melody of Every Orbital Rocket Launch: 1957-2024
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W3hq3spdDRk5
u/jeffwolfe 19d ago
A few observations.
The omission of India from the list on the lower left is pretty glaring, especially considering some of the other entities that were included. Cursory research on my part indicated over 70 Indian launches.
The political nature of launch lists is increasingly problematic. On this list, there is New Zealand/USA but not Russia/Kazakhstan. But of course, trying to deal with Russia/Kazakhstan is a big can of worms with no clean solution.
The inclusion of Starship (Texas launches) is interesting, but the exclusion of Starship would've also been interesting. So far the launches have targeted marginal orbits, which makes sense considering their test objectives. But it turns them into edge cases, with some sources including them and some sources excluding them from orbital launch lists.
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u/Maximum-Resource9514 19d ago
Yes I only realised my error in missing India off the counter in the days after I finished the video. All India launches are included on the map though. I’ll be adding their counter in with future updates.Â
I tried to keep it simple so launches by each space agency count towards their country’s total rather than the country they were launched from.Â
If I had time I would have made a ‘marginally orbital’ class for starship but then I wasn’t sure which others would be in that category.Â
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u/alphagusta 19d ago
If we speak about it in plain terminology, Starship so far has been nothing more than a glorified sounding rocket program. Maybe flight 8 will be the one to change that even if its a near immediate deorbit.
This map should have had like 10 times as many launches with the countless sounding rockets sent up sent since even before the V2's if you want to get technical about it.
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u/Maximum-Resource9514 19d ago
Every starship launch so far is marked as ‘failure’ on this map since none achieved orbit.Â
Perhaps I’ll do another map with every orbital AND suborbital launch including V2s but I’m just one guy and it took me an awfully long time to figure out how to get these orbital launches mapped! 😅🤣
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u/alphagusta 19d ago
None achieved orbit but none of them were aiming anywhere near an orbit. That's the funny thing about the Starship program right now.
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u/Maximum-Resource9514 19d ago
Mmm… maybe they shouldn’t be included either as launches or as failures on any future updates.Â
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u/rshorning 19d ago
Other than Starship is aiming to be an orbital rocket vehicle even if it has yet to actually get to orbit. As opposed to the New Shepard rocket which has never been designed in the first place to achieve orbit. New Shepherd definitely should not be included.
I have no problem with counting Starship as failures at this point, because it is still in testing.
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u/snoo-boop 19d ago
Energia always launched to a transatmospheric orbit, and Atlas V launches Starliner to a transatmospheric orbit.
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u/rshorning 19d ago
The title is "orbital rocket launch", so including sounding rockets exceeds the scope of the video as a project. If you included sounding rockets and sub-orbital launches, it would be a great many more and much harder to ascribe to individual countries, plus the data on that is much harder to obtain as well. Then on top of including sounding rockets, you need to define just how high a rocket must travel to even be included. Do you include every Estes rocket launch and every bit of fireworks that leaves the ground? How about every RPG which gets fired? It simply becomes absurd at some point.
Restricting this to just orbital launches seems reasonable.
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u/Decronym Acronyms Explained 19d ago edited 18d ago
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:
| Fewer Letters | More Letters |
|---|---|
| CST | (Boeing) Crew Space Transportation capsules |
| Central Standard Time (UTC-6) | |
| KSC | Kennedy Space Center, Florida |
| Jargon | Definition |
|---|---|
| Starliner | Boeing commercial crew capsule CST-100 |
Decronym is now also available on Lemmy! Requests for support and new installations should be directed to the Contact address below.
2 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has acronyms.
[Thread #703 for this sub, first seen 22nd Dec 2024, 22:35]
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u/alphagusta 19d ago
SpaceX go Brrr I guess