What is the total mass sent into orbit over all history?

Question

I would like to find a good estimate of the sum total amount of payload that humans have put into space, that is, over all years, all space programs, and all types of payload that reached orbit. Obviously a large fraction of these quickly spent more of their mass as propellant or de-orbited, so it has no physically meaning interpretation.

The total number of orbital launches each year can be found on Wikipedia.

It would follow that if you had the payload for each one of these launches, or a good estimate of average payload, you could find the total mass that has been sent into orbit over human history. I found one source that gives the total number of orbital launches as 5,210, which I think is as of 2010. An obvious approach is to take the number of launches, and multiply by some generic payload mass to get an estimate. So far this is the best I can find online.

There is the problem of military launches, in that we categorically don't have information about those payloads. These seem to be less than 1/3rd of the launches, so it shouldn't introduce any more error than that.

I did find one source that estimates that 255 tons were put into orbit in 2007. That year is probably not representative.

Answer 1

Using the links in Erik's answer and comments, I threw this together.

#!/usr/bin/python3

"""
(C) 2014 Dotan Cohen

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify
it under the terms of the GNU General Public License version 3.

http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html
"""

import re
import time
import urllib.request
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup


def main():

    year_links = []
    year_launches = []
    total_mass = 0

    start_url = 'http://space.skyrocket.de/directories/chronology.htm'
    year_links = get_year_links(start_url)

    for link in year_links:
        launches = get_year_launches(link)
        for launch_url in launches:
            year_launches.append( launch_url )
        
    for launch in year_launches:
        time.sleep(0.1) # Be nice to server
        total_mass += get_launch_mass(launch)

    print("Total mass: %i KG" % (total_mass, ))

    return True


def get_year_links(start_url):

    year_links = []

    html = urllib.request.urlopen(start_url).read()
    parsed_page = BeautifulSoup(html)
    links = parsed_page.find_all('a')

    for link in links:
        link = str(link)
        if 'doc_chr' in link:
            tmp_link = link[link.find('"')+1:]
            tmp_link = tmp_link[:tmp_link.find('"')]
            year_links.append(tmp_link)

    return year_links


def get_year_launches(year_link):

    year_launches = []

    url = 'http://space.skyrocket.de/' + year_link[3:]
    html = urllib.request.urlopen(url).read()
    parsed_page = BeautifulSoup(html)
    links = parsed_page.find_all('a')

    for link in links:
        link = str(link)
        if 'doc_sdat' in link:
            tmp_link = link[link.find('"')+1:]
            tmp_link = tmp_link[:tmp_link.find('"')]
            year_launches.append(tmp_link)

    return year_launches


def get_launch_mass(launch_url):

    mass = 0

    try:
        url = 'http://space.skyrocket.de/' + launch_url[3:]
        html = urllib.request.urlopen(url).read()
        parsed_page = BeautifulSoup(html)

        for pre_mass_element in parsed_page.find_all(text='Mass:'):
            mass_element = pre_mass_element.find_next()
            mass = int(re.search(r'(\d+)', mass_element.text).group(0))

    except Exception:
        pass

    return mass


if __name__ == '__main__':
    main()

The code took 54 minutes to run, here is the output:

Total mass: 10500435 KG

The code visits a website that lists launches by year, and from each year's page it visits each launch's dedicated webpage. From there the code finds the "Mass" table cell. It then extracts the text of the next cell, pulls out the first integer, and adds that to the running total mass. Python!

Since the answer is in code, it can be periodically rerun as new launches occur and as details of old launches are revised.

Update 25 December, 2017:

Total mass: 13367669 KG

Update 23 December, 2019:

$ time ./mass.py 

Total mass: 14466896 KG

real    199m30.311s
user    26m51.576s
sys     0m38.556s

Update 15 February, 2022:

Total mass: 14933443 KG

Answer 2

My son modified the program to dump out data yearly, and also report the number of launches with unknown payload mass. I corrected the data using:

$$m_{estimate} = m_{known}*{n\over n-n_{unknown}}$$

Where:

$m_{estimate}$ is the estimate of mass launched in a given year

$n$ is the number of launches in the year

$n_{unknown}$ is the number of launches where we don't know the payload mass in the year

$m_{known}$ is the total payload mass for those launches that list the payload mass in a year.

With this correction factor, the total tally for all years becomes 17,976,052 kg.

Answer 3

Here is part of the answer: a chronologigal list of all orbital launches and launch attempts for each year. The other part is probably to cross this with the payload each mission delivered to orbit.

Answer 4

Here's an independent estimate.

From Elon Musk's 2022-02-11 Starship Update video presentation after about 16:00 there's a graphic showing 15,517 tons to orbit.

That agrees nicely with @dotancohen's 14,933 tons and sort of with phil1008's ballpark estimate of 17,976 tons.