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How should the "SpaceX makes more than half of all space launches worldwide (in 2025)" question resolve?
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Feb 28
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Rational Ottawa's annual internal predictions last year included "SpaceX makes more than half of all space launches worldwide" (with the "in 2025" implied for all questions). Depending on some necessary assumptions, it's unfortunately quite close and could go either way, so it has been difficult to arrive at a consensus as to exactly which numbers to use and thus how to resolve. Open questions include:

  • Do failed launches count, or only successful ones?

  • Do suborbital launches count, or only orbital and above?

  • Do test launches count, or only "production" launches?

  • How do we count ambiguous cases (such as the third launch of Zuljanah) where it is not publicly known whether it was an orbital production attempt, or another suborbital test flight?

Feel free to share sources and argue in the comments, and the vote on your preference!

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A 'space launch' should include even suborbital launches, so long as they cross in to space (100km altitude, for example, though slightly different parameters could be used). If you only wanted orbital missions that would involve different wording.
I sort of feel that failed launches shouldn't count, only because this allows for easy adjudication against efforts that were not serious attempts to begin with. Also if we are 'keeping score' so to speak we shouldn't be giving credit for failures! But this is not a strong opinion.
Test launches should count.

@BorisBartlog The awkwardness of the 100km line in my mind is that it would include ballistic missile trajectories, and the stats would be completely dominated by the Iran-Israel war. This seems very clearly outside of the original spirit of how we had created the question.

@eapache Hm, yes. I hadn't considered that.

My current opinion is that failed launches should count, but not suborbital ones. If we trust wikipedia's numbers there were 330 such launches in 2025, of which 165 belonged to SpaceX. That is exactly half, but not "more than half", so the question should resolve "no".

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