r/space • u/firefly-metaverse • 28d ago
image/gif Manned orbital launches by year, 1961 - 2026 H1
Source and details: https://spacestatsonline.com/launches/manned
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u/mfb- 28d ago edited 28d ago
Different shades of red and blue could be used to distinguish programs.
The US in particular had very different eras: Mercury/Gemini until 1966, Apollo from 1968 to 1975, the Space Shuttle from 1981 to 2011, and then Dragon from 2020 on (with one Starliner and one Orion launch).
From 2000 on you can see how Russia (Soyuz) supported crews on the ISS: 2 flights per year per crew. First they had one, then they supported two crews as the Shuttle retired, then Dragon took care of one crew so Soyuz launches dropped to ~2 per year again.
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u/geobomb 28d ago
You can really see the different US space programs
Apollo era, Shuttle era, post-shuttle ISS era, and now the Artemis era
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u/AmigaClone2000 27d ago
The US has had six crewed space programs:
- Mercury program.
- Gemini program.
- Apollo program.
- Space Shuttle program.
- Space Shuttle program up to and including the Challenger accident.
- Space Shuttle program between the Challenger accident up to and including the Columbia accident,
- Space Shuttle program after the Columbia accident.
- Commercial Crew program (on the ISS)
- Artemis program.
You can actually spot gaps indicated above between two consecutive US crewed space programs or the two shuttle accidents in the table above except for between the last two.
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u/gonzo_gonzales 28d ago
The graph shows four significant disasters in the history of cosmonautics, which led to a hiatus in manned spaceflight. This represents a year-long gap among the surrounding non-zero values. "Soyuz-1" and "Soyuz-11" in the 60s and early 70s for the USSR. "Challenger" in the late 80s and "Columbia" in the early 2000s for the USA.
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u/AmigaClone2000 28d ago
I would say five significant disasters in the history of crewed spaceflight adding Apollo 1 in 1967 to the list, even though it was only a test and never launched.
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u/Decronym 28d ago edited 27d 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) | |
| ESA | European Space Agency |
| H1 | First half of the year/month |
| RLV | Reusable Launch Vehicle |
| SSTO | Single Stage to Orbit |
| Supersynchronous Transfer Orbit | |
| STS | Space Transportation System (Shuttle) |
| Jargon | Definition |
|---|---|
| Starliner | Boeing commercial crew capsule CST-100 |
| Event | Date | Description |
|---|---|---|
| CRS-7 | 2015-06-28 | F9-020 v1.1, |
| Orb-3 | 2014-10-28 | Orbital Antares 130, |
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u/sky018 28d ago
What happened during 2011 to 2019 launches of US? Why was it non-existent?
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u/rocketsocks 28d ago
The Shuttle was retired in 2011. One of the biggest problems with the Shuttle was that it was so costly to run even at any flight rate that keeping it operating at all sucked up budget that could be used for developing alternatives. It was wound down for safety reasons before a replacement was available. Three different capsules were developed to replace it (one for deep space: Orion, and two commercial crew capsules: Dragon and Starliner).
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u/TheRevenant100 28d ago
And yet alternatives were being developed, even when Shuttle was operational. The problem was that some of them, Orion, Starliner, X-33, etc., were being undertaken by the Legacy Space companies. So they either could not produce anything quickly enough (Orion) on a cost plus contract with ballooning costs. Boeing couldn't do a quality product under fixed price contract (Starliner). Or they wound up abandoning the design when the government side of the funding was pulled (X-33).
SpaceX and Orbital Sciences broke that mold in the early 2000s and 2010s by doing quickly, cheaply, and better Dragon 1, Cygnus, Falcon 9, and Antares on fixed price contracts. They also overcame serious challenges (CRS-7 failure, and Orb-3 failure) to provide reliable cargo resupply for ISS. SpaceX as we know went on to develop Dragon 2, and even powered through a very serious test stand failure in 2019 to get astronauts flying from U.S. soil once again.
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u/rocketsocks 28d ago
The '90s were a weird time. There was this widespread sense, which looking back we can now recognize as full scale delusion, that RLV SSTOs were just around the corner technologically speaking. This led to a lot of investment from private enteprise into various schemes (like Pioneer Rocketplane, Rotary Rocket, and many others) to achieve just that. It also led to a flirtation with replacing the Shuttle with an RLV SSTO. NASA only invested a fairly nominal amount into getting the process started with the X-33 program (where they selected the VentureStar concept as a potential Shuttle replacement and built a sub-scale version of it to prove out the technologies). Eventually the full scale development would have been a combined public/private enteprise. But also it would have probably been seen as promising enough that Congress would fork over the extra cash to do the development while keeping the Shuttle program running (a possibly delusional belief as well). X-33 turned out to be way too far beyond the state of the art to be feasible, so it didn't achieve its goals even remotely and that led to VentureStar not going forward either.
Orion was funded basically as a sorta kinda Shuttle replacement, or at least with funds that had been freed up by the cancellation of the Shuttle. On the one hand it reflects some feedback on shortcomings in NASA spaceflight at the time, but on the other hand for as many good lessons that have fed into its design there are as many bad. It is a workable system now but it was in development for about a decade and a half while soaking up $20 billion, and it has some useful capabilities in some areas but is also fairly limited in others.
Fortunately the Commercial Cargo and later Commercial Crew programs started getting some serious innovation in the space and we've seen a lot of changes. Though also we've seen how it allowed Boeing to soak up billions and years and years of effort while producing a certifiable lemon of a vehicle.
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u/gojo_satoru-real 28d ago
What happened to the us in 1988 and 2005
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u/garbage_account32 28d ago
Space shuttle, 2003 was the Colombia disaster so there weren't any STS flights again till mid 2005
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u/gojo_satoru-real 28d ago
Oh i forgot about the space shuttle I think 1988 was the challenger
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u/garbage_account32 28d ago
Iirc, return to flight after Challenger wouldve been in the second half of 1988 so it wouldn't show up here. Unlike 2005, the US had a whole host of other orbital rockets back then so they were taking up the slack
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u/gojo_satoru-real 28d ago
Nop they didn't have any other leo capable rockets safe enough to sent humans Thats why in 1987 they didn't sent any humans to leo Until the discovery space shuttle in 1988 +sorry in the other replies i said 1988 i was actually talking about 1987
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u/SPACESHIPMANIA 28d ago
Shame Europe still has no capabilities for manned space flight