China led the world in launches once — in 2021 — and has been falling behind since

Methodology

This index answers one question: who actually launches to orbit, and why can nobody agree on the count? It deliberately does NOT cover SpaceX valuation, Starlink subscribers or launch cost per kilogram — those are the existing /data/space-economy index. This one is the launch market around SpaceX: national cadence, vehicle and range concentration, China’s gap to its own plan, and the measurement problem. BASIS — ATTEMPTS, NOT SUCCESSES. The annual series, the country tables, the vehicle table and the site table all count orbital launch ATTEMPTS and all come from one compiler, so the methodology is constant across the seven years shown. Mixing compilers across years would create a trend out of a definitional change. The 2026 figures are year-to-date at 30 July 2026 and are labelled as partial in every subtitle. CORROBORATION. The 2025 point is the one that can be checked against an independent compilation: 324 attempts and 315 successes here, against a separately assembled 315 successful launches elsewhere. Exact agreement on the success count is what makes this series usable despite neither source being a national agency. THE CENTRAL CAVEAT — THE COUNT IS CONTESTED. Four credible compilations report Chinese 2025 orbital launches as 90, 92, 93 and 97, including 92 from China’s own space administration. That seven-launch spread is 7.8% of the total. The causes are definitional: attempts versus successes, whether a launch failing to reach orbit counts, attribution by launching state versus operator nationality, and local-versus-UTC dating around the year boundary. None of the four publishes a reconciliation. This index charts all four rather than picking one, and readers should carry an uncertainty band of roughly plus or minus 4% on any Chinese launch share figure. The same disagreement exists for 2024 (66 versus 68). NOT EXTRAPOLATED. The implied full-year 2026 run rates — about 310 worldwide and about 91 for China — appear in the section detail text as observations and are NOT seeded as data points. Launch activity is back-loaded within a calendar year, so a seven-month extrapolation is a weak estimator, and estimates do not belong on a chart of observed values. CAVEAT — TOP FIVE ONLY. The source publishes a top five for launch vehicles and for launch sites. Entries below the fifth are OMITTED rather than aggregated into a synthetic "other" bar, so those two charts do not sum to the world total and their subtitles say so. CAVEAT — 140 IS A PLAN. China’s 2026 target of 140 or more orbital missions is a stated plan, not a forecast and not an achievement. It is labelled as such in the subtitle and in the point’s value_basis. DROPPED IN VERIFICATION. Three candidate series did not survive the verification pass and are absent rather than approximated: the Wikipedia 2026-in-spaceflight statistics tables (internally inconsistent totals); Guowang and Qianfan constellation sizes (the only available source returned an identical planned-satellite figure for both constellations, which is not credible as two independent values); and payload mass to orbit by country (no consistently-methodised open source found). Compiled and verified 2026-08-14. Working sheet with every source passage: Topics_Content/data/batch-6_aerospace_2026-08-14.md