Four sites, 34 recovered launch records — a partial atlas of the orbital age's first years
The question asked: every orbital launch from 1957 to today, each with its year, launch site, operating bloc and whether the site is still active. The web fetch truncated the very large GCAT catalog, so only 34 directly parsed orbital-attempt records (1957–1959) survive here, cross-checked against a 100-row Launch Library 2 sample covering 1957–1960. This page preserves everything successfully extracted — it is not the full catalog.
Completeness warning. This is a partial deliverable. The GCAT source lists tens of thousands of launches; large-source truncation left 34 orbital-attempt rows here. "Orbital launch" means an orbital attempt, successful or failed (GCAT LaunchCode values beginning with O). Site activity follows GCAT TStop: * means active, a dated TStop means inactive, blank means unknown. All four sites in these rows carry dated TStop values for the pads used, so they read "no longer active" at pad level.
Cape Canaveral alone accounts for 19 of the 34 recovered attempts — more than the other three sites combined — with 8 successes against 11 failures. planet4589.com
All six NOTS EV1 air-launched attempts from China Lake in 1958 failed, the only site here with zero successes alongside Vandenberg's two early failures. planet4589.com
The USSR's 7 attempts all flew from one pad — LC1 at NIIP-5 Baykonur — the pad that launched Sputnik 1 and 2. planet4589.com
The Launch Library 2 cross-check counts 41 launches in 1960 alone, confirming how much of the record the truncated GCAT extract is missing. ll.thespacedevs.com
Data: GCAT (Jonathan McDowell, planet4589.com) launch.tsv joined to GCAT site and organization tables — 34 orbital-attempt rows (LaunchCode starting O) survived a truncated fetch, spanning 1957–1959; plus a 100-row Launch Library 2 sample (1957–1960) used only as a cross-check and summarized by year for space. Outcome is the catalog's success/failure judgment of the orbital attempt; site activity is GCAT TStop (* active, dated inactive). Coordinates are site-level, not pad-level. Sources checked 2026-08-30. This page is explicitly not a complete launch catalog.