In the history of USA space era, when did it have the most launches in the same day, week, month and year?
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I reran the analysis from this answer, but tweaked to use the JSR launch report data, which is a little bit easier to work with, and goes right back to Sputnik. "US" launches were defined by launch site - anything launched from Cape Canaveral / KSC, Vandenberg, Kwajalein, Kodiak Island, Wallops Island, & Point Arguello. It also counts the Pegasus air-launches (both commercial & government) which are indexed seperately. Each launch is only counted once, regardless of number of payloads.
I get a total of 1663 "US" launches out of 5576 successful launches in the full file, ~30%, which sounds about right.
However, we hit a problem. The dates and times we have are in UTC, which is OK for a worldwide approach but a little odd for the US specifically.
Days - for "UTC calendar days", the winner is 27 November 1963 - the only one with three launches - two from Canaveral and one from Vandenberg. On close examination, though, the first of these was at 2:30am UTC, which would have been late the previous night Florida time. Figuring subjective local time for every launch site is beyond me, and it's quite possible that three launches were made on "US calendar time" on a different day - there are 37 days with two launches, and any of them might turn out to be a three on close examination. There are no consecutive two-launch days, though, so the maximum will definitely be three launches in any one "calendar day" or 24-hour window.
Weeks - on the basis of UTC days again, there are two seven-day windows with five US launches. 13-19 December 1962; 6-10 August 1965 (that one is a 5-day window, so very busy!).
Months - by calendar months, it is June 1966, with 9 launches, then December 1964 and December 1965 on 8. If you calculate it on a moving 31-day window, you can identify 11 launches in any of various windows covering May-June 1966 - and I think there is a 32-day window with 12.
Years - 1966 (73 launches), with 50+ launches in all of 1962, 1964, 1965 & 1967.
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$\begingroup$ Very interesting, thank you! Looks like the 1960s are the winners. Mostly experimental launches I guess. What do you think about a question like biggest number of consecutive days with launches? And also the longest time with no launches at all (after say 1970) $\endgroup$– Joe JobsAug 2, 2020 at 13:26
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1$\begingroup$ @JoeJobs Longest continual run of launches, longest gap between launches? I think those should be straightforward to do (with the usual caveats about UTC days and so on). Ask away :-) $\endgroup$ Aug 2, 2020 at 15:30
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$\begingroup$ Thanks! space.stackexchange.com/questions/45725/… - space.stackexchange.com/questions/45724/… $\endgroup$– Joe JobsAug 2, 2020 at 15:55