Orbital Launch Attempts by Month 2025
About This Dataset
Orbital Launch Attempts by Month 2025
What this chart shows
How the 329 orbital launch attempts of 2025 were spread across the twelve months of the year, worldwide and for all launch providers together.
How the data is collected
Each launch in the GCAT list has a UTC launch date. Launches coded as orbital or deep-space attempts, successful or not, were grouped by the calendar month of that date. The twelve monthly counts add up to 329, the figure McDowell gives for 2025.
Background
McDowell's statistics page lists 2025 as the biggest annual total of orbital attempts in the history of spaceflight, and gives 181 attempts by the United States that year as the most any country has made in a single year. His country table credits 17 launches to New Zealand, the same number of Electron launches the catalog records from Rocket Lab's Mahia site.
Limits
Months differ in length, so February has fewer days in which to launch. Because dates are in UTC, a launch late in the evening of 31 December in a western time zone could fall into January of the next year, and the reverse applies at the start of a month. One Chinese Kuaizhou-1A launch on 1 March 2025, which the catalog records as failing before ignition, is not part of the 329.
How the 329 orbital launch attempts of 2025 were spread across the twelve months of the year, worldwide and for all launch providers together.
How the data is collected
Each launch in the GCAT list has a UTC launch date. Launches coded as orbital or deep-space attempts, successful or not, were grouped by the calendar month of that date. The twelve monthly counts add up to 329, the figure McDowell gives for 2025.
Background
McDowell's statistics page lists 2025 as the biggest annual total of orbital attempts in the history of spaceflight, and gives 181 attempts by the United States that year as the most any country has made in a single year. His country table credits 17 launches to New Zealand, the same number of Electron launches the catalog records from Rocket Lab's Mahia site.
Limits
Months differ in length, so February has fewer days in which to launch. Because dates are in UTC, a launch late in the evening of 31 December in a western time zone could fall into January of the next year, and the reverse applies at the start of a month. One Chinese Kuaizhou-1A launch on 1 March 2025, which the catalog records as failing before ignition, is not part of the 329.
Analysis
December was the busiest month of 2025 with 40 orbital launch attempts, nine more than September and November, which tied for second on 31. February was the quietest with 20, exactly half the December figure. The second half of the year saw 181 attempts against 148 in the first half. SpaceX's own monthly count stayed between 12 and 17 all year and peaked in May, so the December spike did not come from SpaceX: it launched 13 times that month, and the other 27 December attempts came from other providers, including 12 by the two Chinese launch academies.
Key Findings
🏆
December leads in Orbital launch attempts with 40 in 2025.
📊
Average Orbital launch attempts in 2025: 27 · median: 26.
↔️
Gap in 2025: December is 2× larger than February.
Data Insights
Numbers, trends & sources behind this chart
Methodology & source
- Data source
- Jonathan McDowell, General Catalog of Artificial Space Objects (GCAT)
- Coverage
- 12 entities · 2025 · 12 observations
- Measure
- Orbital launch attempts
- Last updated
- 16 September 2026
- Compiled by
- The ANYSTAT team, from the source above
How the figures are calculated
- Values are shown as reported by the source. Nothing is rescaled, rebased or converted — the only changes are thousand separators and decimals shown to two places.
- Entities are ranked highest-first on their value in 2025.
An article using this data
Seven in Ten Satellites Launched in 2025 Were Starlinks
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Data Sources & References
All external sources cited in this dataset
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