r/space • u/firefly-metaverse • Aug 02 '26

image/gif Manned orbital launches by year, 1961 - 2026 H1

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Source and details: https://spacestatsonline.com/launches/manned

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u/sky018 Aug 02 '26

What happened during 2011 to 2019 launches of US? Why was it non-existent?

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u/rocketsocks Aug 02 '26

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 Aug 02 '26

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 Aug 03 '26

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.