How many satellites were launched every year?
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Number of satellites launched by decade?
Resources for number of orbiting and active satellites by year?
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$\begingroup$ Search the satcat for things that are still in orbit and sort them by year. Just download a SATCAT or see planet4589.org/space $\endgroup$– uhohCommented Nov 6, 2020 at 9:38
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$\begingroup$ Also, swarms like Starlink are going to skew the numbers by a lot. $\endgroup$– SF.Commented Nov 6, 2020 at 10:03
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$\begingroup$ I'm asking for total number of satellites launched not for number of launches which is much smaller of course $\endgroup$– Joe JobsCommented Nov 6, 2020 at 17:19
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1$\begingroup$ Download the SATCAT mentioned by @uhoh and have at it in Excel $\endgroup$– Carlos NCommented Nov 7, 2020 at 0:56
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$\begingroup$ @JoeJobs some people live exclusively in their phones and may not have access to spreadsheets or simply have an aversion to them as I do. But if you do/don't, this might be a good opportunity for you to do the exercise yourself and post the results as a an answer to your own question. It's always okay to answer your own question in SE. $\endgroup$– uhohCommented Nov 7, 2020 at 1:01
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1 Answer
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Below is a simple count of entries in the 2017 SATCAT file, excluding debris. This list of satellites includes many man-made objects launched into orbit that you may not typically consider a "satellite". For example, the very first Sputnik launch also includes the second stage that orbited the Earth for a while. I don't know of any way to separate those types of satellites other than painfully going through the data and looking up each one.
YEAR COUNT
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1957 3
1958 11
1959 19
1960 51
1961 84
1962 160
1963 143
1964 192
1965 354
1966 416
1967 333
1968 323
1969 267
1970 290
1971 403
1972 364
1973 410
1974 403
1975 502
1976 515
1977 577
1978 419
1979 621
1980 436
1981 494
1982 691
1983 596
1984 587
1985 587
1986 792
1987 480
1988 575
1989 506
1990 530
1991 334
1992 346
1993 282
1994 317
1995 266
1996 219
1997 306
1998 618
1999 718
2000 268
2001 186
2002 191
2003 224
2004 192
2005 167
2006 383
2007 223
2008 232
2009 243
2010 240
2011 264
2012 256
2013 328
2014 318
2015 292
2016 288
2017 355
It wouldn't surprise me if there were some weird exceptions I'm not counting properly. I've got a convenient data source that anybody can access as described in this answer, but perhaps someone with more knowledge of space exploration can verify the accuracy of the below query I used to generate the results:
--Satellites launched per year, excluding debris.
select to_char(launch_date, 'YYYY') year, count(*) count
from launch
join satellite
on launch.launch_id = satellite.launch_id
where official_name not like 'deb %'
group by to_char(launch_date, 'YYYY')
order by year;
Note: This question could probably be better answered by using Jonathan McDowell's new data set - GCAT: General Catalog of Artificial Space Objects. But it will be a while before I have the new data loaded into a database, so you'll need to manually look at the files for the best answer.
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$\begingroup$ 1984 had 128 launches in total. That makes about 5 satellites per launch. Yet by looking at 1984 in spaceflight most launches have one satellite. per launch. I just wonder if this list contain some extra things counted as satellite - en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1984_in_spaceflight $\endgroup$– Joe JobsCommented Nov 8, 2020 at 22:20
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$\begingroup$ Asked a similar question will put a bounty on it soon - space.stackexchange.com/questions/48414/… $\endgroup$– Joe JobsCommented Nov 8, 2020 at 22:37
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2$\begingroup$ I think I may misunderstand the official definition of "satellite". Even after excluding debris, there are lots of satellites with names like "part". Maybe the results are including second stages and other random things related to satellites? I'm not sure how to filter those out though. You might want to look at this query for more details, and see if you can make sense of it:
select * from launch join satellite on launch.launch_id = satellite.launch_id where official_name not like 'deb %' and to_char(launch_date, 'YYYY') = '1984' order by launch_tag;$\endgroup$ Commented Nov 8, 2020 at 23:44 -
$\begingroup$ Cant run a query from my phone. Can you run it for example for January 2016? It has 5 launches one satellite each. So we compare with the result. Or for the entire 2016. Can you upload the query result somewhere? $\endgroup$– Joe JobsCommented Nov 9, 2020 at 0:17
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$\begingroup$ JonHeller - would you answer a question like "List of US states by number of orbital space launches?" I am also ready to put a bounty on it. $\endgroup$– Joe JobsCommented Nov 22, 2020 at 16:43